The Other McCain

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

Feminism Is a Cult (and Feminists Who Say They Don’t Hate Men Are Lying)

Posted on | March 22, 2016 | 18 Comments

Three quick hits. Item Number One:

the idea that males are socialized to work hard to provide for women is so disingenuous. because like it has nothing to do with benevolence or ~female privilege~ and everything to do with making women dependent on males to perpetuate and uphold male dominance over women. like if it was anything other than that males wouldn’t feel affronted if a woman wanted to be independent or their gf/wife made more money than them or other things like
there’s literally nothing benevolent about what males do. males don’t do anything for women that doesn’t benefit them in some way.

So, says this 25-year-old Tumblr feminist, men are incapable of benevolence. No male has ever done anything for any woman, period.

Item Number Two is “Women Not Objects,” which is a campaign to “end the objectification of women in advertising,” per their Twitter profile, and which today apparently launched a hashtag campaign called #IStandUp. And do you know who produces this “objectification”? Gay men, who run the fashion industry. Gay men, who work as photographers and ad designers and magazine editors. Gay men, earning big money in media and advertising and other elements of the New York/Paris/Hollywood pop-culture cartel, and who evidently think that there is something elegant and alluring about skinny teenage girls staring blankly at the camera with the glazed indifference of a heroin addict. For decades, going back to when I was a college boy thumbing through the issues of Cosmopolitan and Vogue lying around my girlfriends’ dorm rooms, I’ve noticed this bizarre vibe in the fashion/advertising world. You know what I’m talking about. Full-page ad — torso of a nearly naked girl, black-and-white photo, shot in that arty Mapplethorpe style — where you have to ask, “What exactly is being advertised here?” It could be jewelry or a fragrance, but the ad isn’t really about the product, is it? No, the ad is about the model, or as much of her as you can see in the ad, anyway.

The fashion industry is all about selling women a gay man’s idea of “glamour.” As a heterosexual man, I don’t mind looking at naked women, but how can you tell me these ads are about selling fashion when the models are always at least half-naked? Here’s an idea: The Fashion Industry Is Decadent and Depraved, and the less you pay attention to it, the better off you’ll be. So, yeah, I got your hashtag, sweetheart.

And finally, Item Number Three:

Don’t be a male feminist. Nobody likes male feminists.

 


Category: Sex Trouble

TERROR ATTACK IN EUROPE: BOMB BLASTS ROCK BRUSSELS AIRPORT; UPDATE: ISIS TO BLAME; ‘LET’S STOP PRETENDING,’ OFFICIAL SAYS UPDATE: 34 DEAD, CNN REPORTS

Posted on | March 22, 2016 | 31 Comments

 

Islamic terrorists struck early Tuesday morning in Europe, as bombs exploded in the Brussels airport. Early reports indicate at least two bombs were used in the attack, which came just days after authorities in Belgium arrested a fugitive sought in the 2015 massacre in Paris.

UPDATE 4:45 a.m. ET: The exact number of killed and wounded in the attack is unknown. CNN’s first online report:

Two explosions occurred at the airport in Brussels, Belgium on Tuesday.
Several people were killed, according to the country’s public broadcaster, RTBF. Initial reports say up to 10 people were killed and more than 30 people were injured.
Federal police at the airport at Zaventem told CNN that “there has been an explosion” and “something has happened.”
Dozens of people have been taken on stretchers out of the airport, according to eyewitnesses.

The New York Times reports:

Two explosions killed at least one person and forced the evacuation of Brussels Airport around 8 a.m. on Tuesday, according to the authorities and news reports, halting arrivals and departures.
The sources of the blasts were unclear, as was the number of wounded, though a witness told CNN that he had seen people being taken away on luggage carts, and photographs on social media showed people streaked with blood and soot, looking stunned but conscious.
Other images posted on social media showed smoke rising from the departure hall, where the windows had been blown out, and people running away from the building. Hundreds were herded outside.
“We are trying to know more about what is going on,” said Anke Fransen, a spokeswoman for the airport. “It is certain there are several victims in our departure hall.”

UPDATE 5 a.m. ET: There are also reports early Tuesday of possible attacks on the Metro commuter rail in Brussels. The attacks follow on the arrest Friday of a key suspect in the November attack in Paris:

The arrest of terror suspect Salah Abdeslam resulted in authorities finding a large number of weapons, Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders said Sunday.
“He was ready to restart something in Brussels,” said Reynders, speaking at the German Marshall Fund’s Brussels Forum. “And it’s maybe the reality because we have found a lot of weapons, heavy weapons, in the first investigations and we have found a new network around him in Brussels.”
The investigation also showed more people were involved in the November 13 Paris attacks than first thought, he said. . . .
His comments were reiterated by Belgian State Security Chief Jaak Raes, who told CNN Belgian affiliate VTM News on Sunday that it was “of the utmost importance that Abdeslam was captured alive, because we can now try to reconstruct the entire scenario.”
That was crucial in order “to see to what extent the intelligence services can learn lessons from the information that is gleaned,” he said.
He warned that the threat posed by ISIS to Europe was far from over, saying: “We know that a number of people are possibly on their way to Western Europe, with the intention of conducting an attack — to, with the ‘jihad mentality,’ do damage to Western democracy. We need to stay very vigilant about that.”
Authorities have said nine terrorists killed 130 people with guns and bombs in Parisian restaurants, shops and a concert venue the night of November 13.

UPDATE 5:50 a.m. ET: The latest news from BBC:

The first set of explosions took place at around 08:00 (07:00 GMT) [3 a.m. EDT] at Zaventum airport.
Some time later, a blast was reported at Maalbeek metro station, close to the city’s EU buildings. . . .
The explosion at Maalbeek station, near the EU institutions in Brussels, at 09:11 (08:11 GMT) [4:11 a.m. EDT] this morning has prompted a shutdown of the entire metro system, and trams and buses are not running either. . . .

  • A French student has tweeted video of people being moved away from Maalbeek station along the metro track.
  • Belgian broadcaster VRT says at least 13 people were killed and 35 were wounded at the airport
  • Shots were heard before the explosions, which appear to have struck near the American Airlines and Brussels Airline check in desk

UPDATE 8:10 a.m. ET: The London Daily Express:

ISIS revenge: Terror group claims
responsibility for Brussels attacks
Reports from Kurdish media said the terror group had admitted being behind today’s strike. . . .
Spanish Foreign Secretary José Manuel García Margallo immediately laid the blame with ISIS — also known by its Arabic acronym Daesh.
He said: “Let’s stop pretending, let’s worry about Daesh, which is the enemy.”
Describing the group as a “terrorist cancer”, he said: “We must be aware that as they are hit in Syria and Iraq, they are going to go elsewhere.
“They have sleeper cells all over the world and Belgium has a very serious problem.”

As of 7:30 a.m. ET, reports indicate at least 15 killed and 55 injured in the Metro bombing. With the 13 reported killed at the airport, that brings the death toll to 28 in Brussels.

UPDATE 10:15 a.m. ET: CNN now reports that the death toll in Brussels is 34, with at least another 170 people injured.

 

Category: Belgium, Europe, Islam, Terrorism

Why Feminists Hate Beauty (And How Capitalism Makes Fairy Tales Come True)

Posted on | March 21, 2016 | 77 Comments

 

Grace Kelly is arguably the most beautiful actress in cinematic history, yet what if she had never gone to Hollywood? Keep that thought in mind the next time you read a Harvard feminist ranting against “the psychology of female objectification,” or denunciations of “the male gaze” in media.

“The male gaze, which refers to the lens through which mostly white, heterosexual men are viewing the world, is a lens of entitlement.”
— Kelsey Lueptow, “4 Ways To Challenge The Male Gaze,” 2013

“Making all the Princesses beautiful, while all the villains are obese or ugly, the Disney Company reinforces the idea that one’s physical appearance is a manifestation of one’s personality. . . .
“The protagonists of these films fulfill unrealistic expectations of beauty, which are then perpetuated as the norm to mainstream society. Giving young girls the idea that they must be beautiful or they will not succeed is incredibly harmful.”
— Melanie Greenblatt, “The Heteronormative Objectification of Women in the Disney Princess Films: A Study of Brand Advertising and Parents’ Perceptions,” 2013

“Western beauty practices not only arise from the subordination of women, but should perhaps be seen as the most publicly visible evidence of that subordination. . . . They are justified by tradition, as in the popular wisdom that women have always wanted to be beautiful and that it is natural for men to be attracted to ‘beautiful’ women.”
— Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West (2005; second edition, 2015)

This kind of feminist rhetoric implies:

  1. Male admiration of female beauty is inherently wrong;
  2. Such “objectification” is not a natural expression of human biology, but is instead “socially constructed” and thus fundamentally political, a manifestation of “male supremacy”;
    and
  3. There is no such thing as beauty, but rather only an artificial preference for certain types of female appearance based in male supremacy and reinforced through media messages.

Feminism’s attack on The Beauty Myth (Naomi Wolf, 1991) would have us believe that Hollywood producers, Paris fashion designers, Madison Avenue advertisers and other sinister forces of patriarchal capitalism have conspired to brainwash us into believing that some women are more beautiful than others. “All Bodies Are Beautiful” has become a popular feminist slogan, and skepticism is impermissible — a ThoughtCrime.

Any man who doubts this ideology — aesthetic egalitarianism, we might call it — will find himself denounced as a misogynist. Men are wrong to prefer Kate Upton to Lena Dunham, according to feminists who wish to silence male praise for beauty, because feminists believe that men’s enjoyment of beauty is harmful, oppressive, sexist. This anti-beauty message has been a core component of feminist rhetoric since 1968, when the Women’s Liberation movement emerged from the New Left and staged its first public protest against the Miss America pageant. Beauty pageants “epitomize the roles we are all forced to play as women,” the protesters declared, 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.”

Notice the words “forced,” “enslaved” and “conditioned,” used to imply that these “ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards” are imposed on women against their will. Are women “forced” to play these “roles”? Do women “compete for male approval” because they have been “conditioned” to do so? Before you answer, consider this: No one is offended if we say, for example, that Warren Buffett is rich, Stefan Curry is tall, or Vladimir Putin is powerful. The scale of values by which men are measured in terms of status and prestige is not controversial. There is no “social justice” movement of men complaining that women are attracted to millionaires, athletes and other high-status males, whereas feminism routinely stigmatizes the normal preferences of heterosexual males.

A radical egalitarian ideology derived from Marxism (many feminist leaders of the 1960s and ’70s were “Red Diaper babies,” i.e., children of Communist Party members), feminist theory assumes that every observable inequality between men and women is unjust and oppressive. The propaganda of such a movement requires that women’s lives be depicted as an endless nightmare of suffering, and that males be demonized as enemies who cruelly inflict this oppression on women.

Feminism is a cult and, like all other cults, seeks its recruits among vulnerable young people who are in some way alienated from society.

 

Feminism’s quasi-religious cult belief system explains to the young recruit that her antisocial resentments — toward her parents, her siblings, her classmates in school, her ex-boyfriend — are entirely justified. Her feelings of self-pity and anger are rationalized by feminist ideology, and she is encouraged to focus her anger on targets designated by the cult leaders. She is supplied with a vocabulary of jargon (“rape culture,” “heteronormativity,” “phallocentrism,” etc.) that makes her feel morally and intellectually superior to those outside the cult. Once she has learned to view life through the warped lenses of feminist theory, it is impossible for her to relate normally to others. She becomes disdainful of anyone who does not share her fanatical devotion to the feminist cause.

Eric Hoffer’s 1951 classic The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements shows how political cults like feminism operate. Yet our education system does not make Hoffer required reading for high school students, to inoculate them against the True Believer mentality. Nor do taxpayer-supported schools ever expose students to anything written by the most articulate critics of the feminist movement. No public high school in America would assign, for example, Christina Hoff Sommers’ Who Stole Feminism? or Carrie Lukas’ The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism. There is a vast library of books by women authors — Danielle Crittenden, Carolyn Graglia, Helen Smith, Dana Mack, Daphne Patai, Mary Eberstadt, et al. — who in one way or another dissent from the anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology of radical feminism.

“The discourses which particularly oppress all of us, lesbians, women, and homosexual men, are those discourses which take for granted that what founds society, any society, is heterosexuality. . . . These discourses of heterosexuality oppress us in the sense that they prevent us from speaking unless we speak in their terms.”
— Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” 1978

“I think heterosexuality cannot come naturally to many women: I think that widespread heterosexuality among women is a highly artificial product of the patriarchy. . . . I think that most women have to be coerced into heterosexuality.”
— Marilyn Frye, “A Lesbian’s Perspective on Women’s Studies,” speech to the National Women’s Studies Association conference, 1980

“In contrast to young women, whose empowerment can be seen as a process of resistance to male dominated heterosexuality, young, able-bodied, heterosexual men can access power through the language, structures and identities of hegemonic masculinity.”
— Janet Holland, Caroline Ramazanoglu, Sue Sharpe and Rachel Thomson, The Male in the Head: Young People, Heterosexuality and Power (1998)

“There are politics in sexual relationships because they occur in the context of a society that assigns power based on gender and other systems of inequality and privilege. . . . [T]he interconnections of systems are reflected in the concept of heteropatriarchy, the dominance associated with a gender binary system that presumes heterosexuality as a social norm. . . .
“As many feminists have pointed out, heterosexuality is organized in such a way that the power men have in society gets carried into relationships and can encourage women’s subservience, sexually and emotionally.”
— Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee, Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions (fifth edition, 2012)

“Only when we recognize that ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’ are made-up categories, invented to control human beings and violently imposed, can we truly understand the nature of sexism. . . .
“Questioning gender . . . is an essential part of the feminism that has sustained me through two decades of personal and political struggle.”
— Laurie Penny, “How to Be a Genderqueer Feminist,” 2015

Feminism assumes as it premise that women constitute an oppressed class, “a sexual caste subordinated to the dominant ruling sex, man,” as Barbara Burris and her comrades asserted in their 1971 “Fourth World Manifesto.” Or, to cite a more recent source: “The sexual caste system privileges male heterosexuals over everyone else,” according to Professor JoAnne Myers, co-founder of Women’s Studies at Marist College.

This radical worldview is now widely accepted at elite schools like the University of Southern California, where the executive director of the USC Women’s Student Assembly calls for the “dismantling of our capitalist imperialist white supremacist cisheteronormative patriarchy.”

Let us now return to the question: What if Grace Kelly had never gone to Hollywood? You must understand that it was only the modern technology of cinema (invented by Thomas Edison in the 1890s) which eventually made it possible for the entire world to admire the beauty of Grace Kelly. Born in 1929, the third of four children of a prosperous Irish Catholic family in Philadelphia, she was 23 when she signed her first Hollywood contract for $850 a week. Two years later, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Two year after that, the 26-year-old star retired from acting to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco, and Princess Grace became the mother of three royal offspring, Caroline, Albert and Stephanie.

 

Feminists who denounce the “heteronormative objectification” of Disney movies for promoting “unrealistic expectations of beauty” would have us ignore the implications of Princess Grace’s biography. We now take for granted the technology that took Grace Kelly from Philadelphia to Hollywood to the royal court of Monaco, just as we take for granted the technology that permits a blogger in his pajamas to critique the theories of Harvard students and tenured professors. This technology — produced by a system known as capitalism — is phenomenally powerful and innovative, and capitalism liberates human beings in amazing ways.

Capitalism pays our bills, capitalism feeds our children, capitalism funds the enterprises that provide us with the means of communication and transportation by which an Irish Catholic girl from Philadelphia can become European royalty. Capitalism makes fairy tales come true.

 

Well, why does Professor Jeffreys scoff at the idea that “women have always wanted to be beautiful and that it is natural for men to be attracted to ‘beautiful’ women”? Why does she put “beautiful” in quotation marks, as if the meaning of this word was somehow suspicious or misleading? Or why would other feminist professors speak of heterosexuality as “a highly artificial product of the patriarchy,” by which men “access power through . . . hegemonic masculinity” within “a gender binary system that presumes heterosexuality as a social norm”?

“[Feminism is] a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”
— Pat Robertson, 1992

Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It, an ideology profoundly hostile to everything that brings hope and happiness to human life, including both capitalism and beauty.

Here at the desk in my home office, I am surrounded by stack of books about feminist theory: Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality by Peggy Reeves Sanday (1981), The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory by Marilyn Frye (1983), The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner (1986), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State by Catharine MacKinnon (1989), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler (1990),  Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives by Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim (2002), Theorizing Sexuality by Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott (2010) and Modern Feminist Theory: An Introduction by Jennifer Rich (2014), to name but a few. None of these books, however, are actually helpful in understanding human nature. In fact, we have reason to suspect, confusion is a common result for the many thousands of young students who are indoctrinated in feminist theory in university Women’s Studies courses every year. Why do we need professors teaching theory, when the truth is so simple?

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply . . .”
— Genesis 1:27-28 (KJV)

No student at Harvard (annual tuition $45,278) or Yale (annual tuition $47,600) is taught this truth. It is unlikely a student who believes the Bible would go anywhere near Harvard or Yale. The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved, and no Christian parent would send their children to such infernal institutions, where perverted professors teach satanic doctrines to corrupt the souls and poison the minds of youth.

Feminists reject any suggestion that there is anything natural about human sexual behavior, instead believing women are “coerced into heterosexuality” because of “the power men have in society.” Feminists believe “that ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’ are made-up categories,” and this denial of any natural basis for heterosexual attraction means that male admiration of beauty — and women’s pleasure in being admired by men — can only “arise from the subordination of women.”

Because feminists are “without natural affection” (Romans 1:31), they seek to destroy human happiness. Feminists hate love itself.




 

 


Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 03.21.16

Posted on | March 21, 2016 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.21.16

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Why Is John Kasich Even Running?
Da Tech Guy: I Think Mr. Spock Has Jack Pegged
Proof Positive: We All Know Why The Eagle Walks
The Political Hat: Affirmative Suicide For Whites
Michelle Malkin: Thank You, Hulk Hogan!
Twitchy: “Oh, It’s On!” Donald Trump Responds To Fauxcahontas
Shark Tank: Obama Lands In Cuba, Condones Decades Of Human Rights Violations


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: How David Brooks Created Donald Trump
American Thinker: Behold The Anti-Trump Disruptors
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – Off The Grid by C.J. Box
Conservatives4Palin: Sarah Palin Blasts The #NeverTrump Crowd
Don Surber: Arizona Trump Protesters Shut Down Highway, Creating 300,000 More Trump Voters
Jammie Wearing Fools: Grinning Imbecile Meets His Communist Heroes
Joe For America: Romney Throws Kasich Under The Bus: Vote For Cruz!
JustOneMinute: Science Trudges On
Pamela Geller: Muslim Community Helped Paris Terrorist Hide From Police
Shot In The Dark: Lie First, Lie Always – The Strib Marinates In The Bloomberg Kool-Aid
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Things You Might Delegate
The Lonely Conservative: The Ruling On Ted Cruz’ Eligibility The Media Missed
This Ain’t Hell: AP Scrutinizes The Army’s Fugitive Program
Weasel Zippers: Lena Dunham Shocked To Find Liberals More Hostile To Her Support For Hillary Than “Anything I’ve Received From The Right Wing”
Megan McArdle: When Your Spouse Is A Picky Eater


Elvis Is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself
They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat

Category: Linkagery

Rule 5 Sunday: St. Patrick’s Day Post-Mortem

Posted on | March 20, 2016 | 9 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone, and apparently here in Las Vegas it’s no big thing, which is fine with this disaffected (3/8ths) Irish Catholic, though I did wear black and tan to commemorate the occasion. This week’s appetizer is the always appropriate Kate Upton. As usual, the following links are to pics of (usually) attractive young women with (usually) few or no clothes, which are generally considered NSFW; the management is not responsible for any alcoholism, beatings, stonings, religious argumentation or other ill consequences arising from your failure to click only at approved times and places.

No quibbling over the shade of green, now.

Goodstuff leads off this week with Young Cher plus other Rule 5 delights, followed by Ninety Miles from Tyranny with Morning Mistress, Girls With Guns, and Hot Pick…Camel…No; Animal Magnetism contributes Rule 5 2017 Budget Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, while The Last Tradition has Raquel Welch and Bryiana Noelle, while First Street Journal goes Back To Basic for his weekly tribute to women in uniform.

EBL’s herd of heifers this week includes Pi Day, A Nickelhead For SCOTUS, Kasich and Monroe, Carl’s Jr. Robot Servers, Nina Dobrev, Geraldine Fitzgerald, St. Patrick’s Day In Hollywood, and Donne Siciliane.

A View from the Beach adds Attack of the News Boobs with Olivia Munn, Wait for the Happy Ending!, Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!, “Catch Me If You Can”, A Tuesday Morning Shower, Happy Pi Day, “Brave Lil’ Fighter”, Mildly Warm Girl Explains Cool Thing, Look Where Secret Squirrel Hides His Nuts! and “Dink’s Song”.

American Power returns after a long absence with Jessica Simpson, Tanya Mityushina, Nina Agdal, Hannah Davis, Hailey Clauson, Kelly Rohrbach, and Samantha Hoopes.

At Soylent Siberia, it’s your morning coffee creamer, Monday Motivationer Morning Stretch, Tuesday Titillation Think Pink, Humpday Hawtness, and a Fantastic Fursday.

The DaleyGator’s DaleyBabes included Jojo dela Cruz, Janelle Monae, Mion Sanada, Paige Van Zant, Nozomi Aso, Girls Stretching, and Marisa Ramirez.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Kara Del Toro, Sex in Advertising is covered by Victoria’s Secret, and his Vintage Babes are Irish babes. At Dustbury, it’s Missy Peregrim and Carol Alt.

Thanks to everyone for your linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for next week’s Rule 5 roundup (Easter parade?) is midnight on Saturday, March 26; please remember to link to Rule 5 Sunday and send that link to Wombat-socho before noon on Saturday.


Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop

Category: Rule 5

Fear and Loathing: ‘Kazika the Mad Jap’ Could Not Be Reached for Comment

Posted on | March 20, 2016 | 120 Comments

Here’s a headline:

What Happens to Journalists When No One
Wants to Print Their Words Anymore?
As newsrooms disappear, veteran older reporters
are being forced from the profession.
That’s bad for journalism — and democracy.

Please shut up. Nobody feels sorry for you, and probably nobody should. The idea that people are entitled to be employed in whatever field they choose to pursue, and that once they get hired, they then have a “right” to keep that job — that is what’s bad for democracy.

Newspapers were my life for more than 20 years. Deadline after deadline after deadline — from 1986 to 2008, that’s what it was about. From the day I talked myself into a job as a $4.50-an-hour staff writer at a tiny weekly in Austell, Georgia, until the day I quit the Washington Times after a decade as assistant national editor and Culture page editor, my life was all about deadlines. It was a job I loved except for when I hated it, but one scam I never bought into was the lofty illusion cherished by the Professional Journalism types who insisted that the rotten pay and miserable working conditions of the typical newspaper reporter were justified because we were doing What’s Good For Democracy.

Bovine excrement.

We were doing what was good for the advertisers and the publisher, and any benefit to Democracy was strictly incidental. Long before the Internet made it possible to have “metrics,” as they say, of reader interest, I realized that there was a disconnect between (a) the average journalist’s conception of his job, and (b) what most readers actually wanted to read. Two or three decades ago, there was a lot of puffy nonsense — the kind of stuff you’d read in Columbia Journalism Review or the monthly American Society of News Editors (ASNE) bulletin — about “community service” and “investigative journalism” and so forth, all of which amounted to your mother telling you to eat your broccoli.

Every major metro daily in the country was piling manpower into the kind of five-part “investigative” series (or “enterprise journalism”) cynics used to call “Pulitzer bait.” This always seemed to involve a pet liberal crusade — racism, environmentalism, homelessness, etc. — that would appeal to the sensibilities of the Professional Journalism types who think of their jobs as What’s Good For Democracy: “Eat your broccoli.”

Supply, Demand and Lunatic Gibberish

OK, so what if the readers didn’t want broccoli? What if what they wanted was, y’know, actual news? Or sports — which was my gig for about five years, and I don’t mean to brag, but I was good at it. Developing reader loyalty requires thinking: What does the reader want to read?

Hunter S. Thompson understood this completely:

There was a time, about ten years ago, when I could write like Grantland Rice. Not necessarily because I believed all that sporty bullshit, but because sportswriting was the only thing I could do that anybody was willing to pay for. And none of the people I wrote about seemed to give a hoot in hell what kind of lunatic gibberish I wrote about them, just as long as it moved. They wanted Action, Color, Speed, Violence…. At one point, in Florida, I was writing variations on the same demented themes for three competing papers at the same time, under three different names. I was a sports columnist for one paper in the morning, sports editor for another in the afternoon, and at night I worked for a pro wrestling promoter, writing incredibly twisted “press releases” that I would plant, the next day, in both papers.
It was a wonderful gig, in retrospect, and at times I wish I could go back to it — just punch a big hatpin through my frontal lobes and maybe regain that happy lost innocence that enabled me to write, without the slightest twinge of conscience, things like: “The entire Fort Walton Beach police force is gripped in a state of fear this week; all leaves have been canceled and Chief Bloor is said to be drilling his men for an Emergency Alert situation on Friday and Saturday nights — because those are the nights when ‘Kazika, The Mad Jap,’ a 440-pound sadist from the vile slums of Hiroshima, is scheduled to make his first — and no doubt his last — appearance in Fish-head Auditorium. Local wrestling impressario Lionel Olay is known to have spoken privately with Chief Bloor, urging him to have ‘every available officer’ on duty at ringside this weekend, because of the Mad Jap’s legendary temper and his invariably savage reaction to racial insults. Last week, in Detroit, Kazika ran amok and tore the spleens out of three ringside spectators, one of whom allegedly called him a ‘yellow devil.'”
“Kazika,” as I recall, was a big, half-bright Cuban who once played third-string tackle for Florida State University in Tallahassee, about 100 miles away — but on the fish-head circuit he had no trouble passing for a dangerous Jap strangler, and I soon learned that pro wrestling fans don’t give a fuck anyway.

This is exactly right. Action, Color, Speed, Violence — write something the reader enjoys reading. He wants personalities and action, and your job is to find Kazika the Mad Jap, the star of the show. In Gordon County, Georgia, circa 1990, this might have been Timmy Star, power forward for Fairmount High, but in Rome, Georgia, circa 1993, it was a Floyd County commissioner who fought a tooth-and-nail battle over local sales taxes. All that ridiculous Pulitzer-bait eat-your-broccoli five-part-series crap that the ASNE bulletin and the Columbia Journalism Review took so seriously? Readers generally hated that stuff, and I didn’t blame them.

Does anyone remember Bill Kovach? He was Washington bureau chief for the New York Times before the idiots in charge at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution hired Kovach to turn their paper into . . .

Well, broccoli. Because broccoli’s Good for Democracy.

Kovach spent two years as editor and damned near ruined the Atlanta papers with his pretentious (but Pulitzer Prize-winning) ideas about publishing broccoli journalism. During his tenure, Kovach not only alienated many readers, he also lost sight of the fact that in Atlanta, the business community expects the local newspaper to act as a publicity agent. Atlanta was famous during the Civil Rights era as “The City Too Busy to Hate,” because civic leaders recognized that racial conflict was bad for business. Cynics observed that, in truth, Atlanta was The City Too Greedy to Care. If Jim Crow was good for business, Atlanta would be segregated, and if Jim Crow proved to be a net liability, Atlanta would integrate peaceably, but either way, what the Chamber of Commerce wanted, the Chamber of Commerce got. Labels like “liberal”and “conservative” didn’t have a damned thing to do with these entirely pragmatic and self-interested calculations. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, the only color that really matters in Atlanta is green.

Well, Mr. Kovach didn’t quite understand this worldview, and he managed to piss off the Chamber of Commerce, and in November 1988, he “resigned,” officially, but everyone knew it was more like he got pushed out the door, and there ensued all kinds of hand-wringing and moaning from the Good for Democracy types.

This drew a sarcastic retort from the newspaper’s most popular columnist, Lewis Grizzard, who wrote that the paper would be better off without Kovach, “with apologies to those who enjoy exhaustive series on what’s doing in Africa.” Grizzard’s jab was aimed at Kovach’s nutty idea that because (a) Atlanta had a large black population, therefore (b) the paper should have lots of coverage of news in Africa. This was deemed an enlightened and sophisticated attitude by the Good for Democracy crowd, or you might view it as condescending and vaguely racist.

Many white Southerners are of Scots-Irish ancestry, but Kovach didn’t start filling the pages of the Atlanta papers with daily updates from Belfast or Edinburgh. No, if the IRA set off a bomb, the paper would run a four-paragraph item from the Associated Press on page A7, and otherwise the only news from the ancestral homeland was the sports-page coverage of the British Open at the Royal St. Andrews.

Identity politics and liberal notions of “diversity” have so polluted the journalism racket that now even the sports pages are full of “social justice.” If there is a gay outfielder playing for some AA farm team anywhere in America, all he has to do is send an email to Sports Illustrated and they’ll run a 6,000-word feature about his courageous struggle against homophobia in Dubuque or Albuquerque or wherever.

Whether or not broccoli journalism is Good for Democracy, it’s not good for journalism, because people get tired of being told what to think.

A newsroom is not a pulpit, and editors are not theologians, and if you want to preach a sermon by disguising it as a five-part investigative series about homelessness or whatever, you might eventually find yourself preaching to an empty church, because readers are not entirely stupid. Your pretentious attitude as Our Moral Superiors™ is tiresome and obnoxious, and people won’t pay money to be treated like third-graders being scolded by their teacher. But I digress . . .

Blame Al Gore, Because Why Not?

When Bill Kovach decided circa 1987 that the Atlanta papers needed a bureau in Nairobi, he could afford to do it, because the paper was making a handsome profit from advertising revenue. The fact that advertising ultimately paid the bills — the source of revenue, whereas the salaries of the newsroom staff were an expense — was an aspect of journalism that a lot of Good for Democracy types never really figured out. Bottom-line considerations were far from the minds of most people in our nation’s newsrooms 25 years ago, before Al Gore invented the Internet, and then some guy named Matt Drudge became America’s Editor-in-Chief.

Oh, the pages and pages of classified ads — help wanted, real estate, used cars, whatever — that were once such a magnificent revenue generator for newspaper publishers. Oh, the display ads from department stores, and the full-color advertising inserts stuffed inside that thick Sunday paper. Nearly all gone now — gone with the wind, along with the fat profit margins that allowed Bill Kovach the luxury of force-feeding readers in Atlanta their journalistic broccoli about the famine in Sudan. Gone, those glory days when newsrooms were so crowded, and every major metropolitan paper had an “investigative journalism” team of a half-dozen hotshots whose bylines rarely appeared in print except on those tedious five-part series written for the eyes of the Pulitzer Prize judges.

Yeah, once upon a time, every newspaper in every state capital in America — from Tallahassee to Juneau, from Augusta, Maine, to Honolulu, Hawaii — had its own local crew of would-be Woodward and Bernsteins who believed they were producing journalism that was Good for Democracy.

Gone! All gone now! And nobody gives a damn, except crybabies like Dale Maharidge, the journalism professor at Columbia University who wrote that idiotic headline: “What Happens to Journalists When No One Wants to Print Their Words Anymore?” Oh, the AFL-CIO to the rescue!

As digital journalism finds its place in the new-media landscape, helped by a crop of new web-only publications, younger journalists are beginning to demand the kind of work protections, decent wages and newsroom solidarity that many of their older counterparts once enjoyed. In the past year, workers have voted to unionize at Gawker, Vice, Salon and ThinkProgress, affiliating with the Writers Guild of America East, AFL-CIO. In January,The Huffington Post’s management voluntarily recognized the WGAE to represent 262 employees. The union negotiates “compensation, benefits, and job security” for its members.

Isn’t that nice? The “workers . . . voted to unionize at Gawker,” which just got hit with a $115 million judgment after former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan sued them for publishing a sex video of him. Delicious irony.

“Kazika the Mad Jap” could not be reached for comment.

Is my blog Good for Democracy? Probably not, but please remember the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!




 

UPDATE: Welcome, Vox Day readers!

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers! And, yes, Hunter S. Thompson had a very low opinion of journalism professors:

In the context of journalism, here, we are dealing with a new kind of “lead” — the Symbiotic Trapezoid Quote. The Columbia Journalism Review will never sanction it; at least not until the current editor dies of brain syphilis, and probably not even then.
What?
Do we have a libel suit on our hands?
Probably not, I think, because nobody in his right mind would take a thing like that seriously — and especially not that gang of senile hags who run the Columbia Journalism Review, who have gone to considerable lengths in every issue during the past year or so to stress, very heavily, that nothing I say should be taken seriously.
“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” George Bernard Shaw said that, for good or ill, and I only mention it here because I’m getting goddamn tired of being screeched at by waterheads. Professors are a sour lot, in general, but professors of journalism are especially rancid in their outlook because they have to wake up every morning and be reminded once again of a world they’ll never know.

The Great Shark Hunt, p. 286.

UPDATE III: Linked at American Power — thanks! — and now a thread at Memeorandum.

UPDATE IV: Linked by Larwyn at Director Blue — thanks!

 


Category: Fear. Loathing., Journalism, Media Bias

Are Women Paid Less? Try This: Supply, Demand, Some Assembly Required

Posted on | March 20, 2016 | 41 Comments

Good news! “Progress” is “stalling”:

Women’s median annual earnings stubbornly remain about 20 percent below men’s. Why is progress stalling?
It may come down to this troubling reality, new research suggests: Work done by women simply isn’t valued as highly. . . .
A new study from researchers at Cornell University found that the difference between the occupations and industries in which men and women work has recently become the single largest cause of the gender pay gap, accounting for more than half of it. In fact, another study shows, when women enter fields in greater numbers, pay declines — for the very same jobs that more men were doing before. . . .
Once women start doing a job, “It just doesn’t look like it’s as important to the bottom line or requires as much skill,” said Paula England, a sociology professor at New York University. “Gender bias sneaks into those decisions.” . . .

(Yeah, this makes sense. When you need someone to explain economics, the expert you want to call is a sociology professor.)

Over all, in fields where men are the majority, the median pay is $962 a week — 21 percent higher than in occupations with a majority of women, according to another new study, published Friday by Third Way . . .
Of the 30 highest-paying jobs, including chief executive, architect and computer engineer, 26 are male-dominated, according to Labor Department data analyzed by Emily Liner, the author of the Third Way report. Of the 30 lowest-paying ones, including food server, housekeeper and child-care worker, 23 are female dominated.

Emily Liner attended Georgetown University (annual tuition $48,611) where she majored in history and French. A former staffer for a Democrat congressmen, Liner worked five years for a Democrat Party fundraising consultant, before going back to get her MBA at the University of North Carolina. She is now a “policy advisor” for Third Way, a tax-exempt organization which in 2013 had a budget of nearly $10 million, and paid its eight top officers a combined total of $1.7 million, led by president Jonathan Cowan’s $336,000 compensation. (Of the eight officers listed on Third Way’s IRS Form 990, only two are women. But maybe “gender bias sneaks into those decisions,” eh?) Cowan, who worked for Democrat congressmen and served in the Clinton administration, then started a gun-control organization (Americans for Gun Safety) that after the 2004 election became Third Way.

All of which is to say that this “news article” — published on the front page of the business section of the Sunday New York Times — is really just a regurgitated press release from a Democrat propaganda operation. This article is clearly intended to support the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign’s claim that the “gender gap” in pay is a real thing, which economists have repeatedly shown it is not. Controlling for various factors, including hours worked per week, women make about 95 cents for every dollar men earn, rather than the 77 cents claimed by feminists, whose answer to every policy issue is always the same: Vote Democrat!

Don’t be deceived by partisan propaganda disguised as “news.” To quote Christina Hoff Sommers, “this is a massively discredited factoid.”




 


Category: Economics, Media Bias, New York Times, Sex Trouble

Spring Training

Posted on | March 20, 2016 | 12 Comments

— by Wombat-socho


The worst part about being in the tax mines this year has been having an inordinate amount of time on my hands, since the office I’m working in here in Las Vegas is nowhere near as busy as the former home office in Alexandria, Virginia. Looked at another way, I’m losing a lot of time when I could be reading books, and unfortunately not filling that time with work on peoples’ taxes. Such is life in Sin City. Most of what I have been reading of late has been books in my library that I haven’t seen in a while – for example, Larry Niven’s Neutron Star, not to be confused with the updated version, Crashlander, that drops the non-Beowulf Shaeffer stories and adds “Procrustes” and some framing material so that it seems more like a novel. I vaguely recall reading this before I took up book blogging here, and being none too impressed. Your mileage may vary.

Another set of oldies but goodies are the Prince Roger novels by David Weber and John Ringo, recently repackaged by Baen into two two-volume collections, Empire of Man and Throne of Stars. If you haven’t read these, they’re a great coming of age story wrapped up with interstellar skulduggery, an extremely hostile, barely-explored planet…and of course, the ongoing conflict between Roger Ramius McClintock, Heir Tertiary to the throne and a spoiled brat to end all spoiled brats, and his bodyguards: the Bronze Barbarians, a company of the toughest Marines in the Empire, who are going to get Roger back to civilization…or die trying. The natives are hostile and dangerous, the local animals only slightly less so, and they’re the EASY parts of the problem. These are some of my favorite SF novels, and if you have a taste for combat SF, I think you’ll like them too.

Also worth your time is a very short novel by Alexis Gilliland, The End of the Empire, chronicling the last days of Senior Colonel Saloman Karff, an officer in the Holy Human Empire’s Gestapo, as he fights enemies internal and external during the Empire’s retreat to Malusia. Malusia is an interesting place, a water world that can’t feed itself and that can’t pull itself together to do so thanks to the locals’ being infected with all the worst features of anarchism and libertarianism, and Karff is sent to investigate it as a possible new home for the fleeing Imperials…but is it instead a trap being laid by traitors who sold out to the rebels? Drollery and action ensues. A quick and amusing read; one wonders why Del Rey hasn’t brought it back in a Kindle edition.

Baseball Prospectus 2016 is one of the dozens of books spawned by Bill James getting shut of the Baseball Abstracts he used to write in the 1980s. Featuring hundreds of player evaluations, and occasionally articles on the teams when the contributors haven’t been distracted by some other topic, this is probably one of the best books to pick up if you take your fantasy baseball seriously. Speaking of Bill James, he’s still publishing The Bill James Handbook 2016, which is not as concerned with teams or prospects as the Baseball Prospectus folks but more with individual achievements. The annual chapters on The Favorite Toy and the leader boards are always worth looking at. Which one’s better? I couldn’t tell you; I have a large stack of both waiting to be put up on my shelves.

And what have you been reading?


Category: Books
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