The Other McCain

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

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.


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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

FMJRA 2.0: Corned Beef & Eggroll, $3.99

Posted on | March 19, 2016 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

In The Mailbox: Early Weekend Edition
Proof Positive
Batshit Crazy News

A Theory of Sex (and Feminism)
Living In Anglo-America
Batshit Crazy News

Bill the Conqueror Fought at Hastings in 1066 to Equalize Wages for Oppressed Women #HistoryByHillary
A View from the Beach

FMJRA 2.0: A Small Collection Of Chords
The Pirate’s Cove
A View from the Beach
Batshit Crazy News

Rule 5 Sunday: Looking Back, All I Did Was Look Away
Ninety Miles from Tyranny
A View from the Beach
Proof Positive
Batshit Crazy News

George Soros’s Diary Hacked! Ominous Revelations Abound.
A View from the Beach

Feminism Hates Boys
Lisa Graas
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 03.14.16
A View from the Beach
Proof Positive
Batshit Crazy News

Heterosexuality Is Now a Crime at Yale: The Persecution of Jack Montague
Regular Right Guy
Living In Anglo-America
Batshit Crazy News

‘A Hostile Male Element’
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

Many Thanks To Katie Packer For “Our Principles PAC”
Regular Right Guy

Please Pray for My Brother (UPDATED)
Regular Right Guy
The Camp of the Saints

In The Mailbox: 03.15.16
Regular Right Guy
Proof Positive
Batshit Crazy News

A Fascinating Video: How Academic Feminists Persecute Their Opponents
Regular Right Guy
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 03.16.16
Regular Right Guy
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 03.17.16
A View from the Beach
Proof Positive

Feminist Tumblr Syndrome Strikes Again
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox: 03.18.16
Proof Positive
Batshit Crazy News

You Are Your Own Problem
Adam Piggott
Batshit Crazy News

Top linkers this week:

  1.  Batshit Crazy News (14)
  2.  (tied) Regular Right Guy and A View from the Beach (7)
  3.  Proof Positive (6)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!


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Category: FMJRA Award

Feminist Tumblr: ‘Broken People’ and the Tragedy of the Darwinian Dead End

Posted on | March 19, 2016 | 99 Comments

Sometimes I’ll write about a feminist and a commenter will remark what happy news it is that this hateful creature will not reproduce. Alas, as a parent and a Christian, I feel tremendous sadness at such outcomes, for I know that every time some foolish young woman climbs aboard the express train to Crazy Cat Lady Land, she deprives her parents of the hope of grandchildren, and subtracts herself from the genetic future.

“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

What a profound irony that these atheistic women, believing Darwinism has proven that God does not exist — which the fool hath said in his heart — have consigned themselves to extinction in the name of Science.

They are free to curse God and die, and let us pray that their hateful doctrines perish with them. Yet this is tragic, and also unnecessary, if only parents were wise enough to study how this evil idea has flourished in our time, and thoughtfully guarded against this latter-day gnosticism. (When theologian Peter Jones wrote, “Gnosticism and feminism are a match made in heaven,” he was only half-right — this “match” was made in Hell.)

Bad ideas have a persistent appeal to the minds of fools, and so we must never be surprised to see old heresies strutting around in new clothes. Young adherents of obsolete errors call themselves “progressive” while insisting that those who stubbornly cling to eternal truth are behind the times. We watch them parade past us, chanting their slogans (“Social Justice!” “He for She!” “Black Lives Matter!”), a Grand Army of Fools marching in lockstep along a road Paved With Good Intentions, the proverbial destination of which they seem not to suspect. They call us ignorant for refusing to join them, but in fact we have far more knowledge than do the fools in the “progressive” parade.

“One sometimes gets the impression that the
mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards
them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist,
sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack,
pacifist, and feminist in England.”

George Orwell wrote that in 1937, but within 30 years, the same predictable phenomenon was apparent in the “hippie” movement, and now we see it all over again with “social justice” — cranks, crackpots and assorted kooks of every kind, too ignorant of history to realize that their basic type was a ridiculous cliché long before they were ever born.

Ordinary life is too ordinary for the bohemian dreamer with intellectual aspirations who longs to be part of History with a capital “H.” They are suckers for whatever seems avant-garde among the more sophisticated of their peers. Back when I was in high school, it was Carlos Castaneda (whom I never read) or Rick Wakeman (whom no one listens to now), and Earth Shoes and hip-hugger bell-bottom jeans, etc. Far out, man.

All that funky Keep On Truckin’ vibe circa 1975 is as passé as 8-track tapes and as dead as Gerald Ford, but it was cool then. What’s cool with sophisticated youth now is Third Wave feminist theory — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix:

To translate this to plain English, if you are a normal (feminine) woman who feels normal (heterosexual) attraction toward normal (masculine) men, this means that you have been brainwashed by society into accepting your own oppression under the system of male supremacy. Feminists believe that heterosexuality isimposed on women by the patriarchy — women are “coerced into heterosexuality,” as Professor Marilyn Frye explained — and feminine behavior is simply the performance of inferiority. Gender “glamorizes the subordinate status of females” and creates an artificial appearance of male-female difference in order “to clearly mark the subordinate class [i.e., females] from the privileged class [i.e., males].”
Thus, there are no natural differences between male and female, according to feminist theory, only the oppressive hierarchy of “gender” by which society enforces male supremacy.

Whereas once “queer” was an insult hurled by rednecks looking for a fight, now we have Mimi Marinucci proclaiming Feminism Is Queer, and who am I to disagree? She’s a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies with a Ph.D. from Temple University, and I’m just a guy with a blog.

Gender-neutral and gender-inclusive language . . . is inadvertently but inevitably exclusionary. What interferes with neutrality is the priority implicitly granted to heterosexual men. . . . Whether the division is between male and female, feminine and masculine, women and men, lesbian women and gay men, or whatever, is largely irrelevant. It is irrelevant because the binary system of gender, sex, and sexuality is not just an unrelated sex of categories, some involving biological sex and others involving learned behaviours and social or sexual roles. Rather, it is a holistic framework that regards gender, sex, and sexuality as expressions of a basic division of the human world into two distinct natural kinds.

Does that excerpt from Profesor Marinucci’s book (p. 75, a random selection) confuse you? Yeah, we could parse it out, read it carefully two or three times and derive some sense of her meaning, but why? Exactly what do we need to know that Professor Marinucci has to tell us? Not much. Insofar as we are normal human beings interested in sex as a matter of biology — we are mammals, OK? — it is not nearly as complicated as Professor Marinucci would have her readers believe. Heck, I figured all this out by the time I was in eighth grade and never once dreamed of using the phrase “holistic framework” to describe it. What did I dream of in eighth grade? Well, she played oboe in the band and I played trombone, but that’s not really relevant, is it?

No, what I want to write about is Feminist Tumblr, that swirling vortex of estrogen-induced Internet madness where Friday I found this:

Okay but… I’m surrounded by f–kboys?? Like ALL the time. Even the moderately decent ones are 100% f–kboys. WHY?? WHY?
I got the skeeziest once over from one of the new f–kboys and then one of the other ones that I’ve been having issues with BECAUSE HE SUCKS AT HIS F–KING JOB BUT THINKS HE’S HOT SH*T SO REFUSES TO DO BETTER decided to try flirting with me and then say “Well, you know, I only date people I work with” and I rolled my eyes so f–king hard holy shit and actually said “Yeah, well, I literally have no interest in dating anyone so” to which THE ENTIRE TEAM OF F–KBOYS RESPONDED THAT THEY DOUBT THAT because obviously their personalities and their d–ks are so f–king magical that I MUST want them, righT????????? so then I just “Sweetheart, trust me, if it was a lie I wouldn’t be wearing a shirt that literally says it” (wearing my “Asexual pirate isn’t interested in your booty” shirt today) AND THEY STILL WEREN’T STOPPING AND OMG THEY’RE SO SELF IMPORTANT LIKE WHY???
Mostly it just wasn’t that bad because they’re all children to me, regardless of age and how mature they think they are. So lots of eye rolls. A few of them aren’t 100% awful (1 is actually kinda chill) but yeah, no. Still f–kboys.

Wow. What a fun person to work with. This charming discourse intrigued me, so I was eager to learn more about Ms. Angry Asexual:

Panromantic asexual//demi-romantic asexual (because I rarely experience romantic attraction but when I do gender’s not a factor).
I’m 22, and I didn’t know that I was asexual until I was almost 21 years old . . .
Until then, I dated and generally did a LOT of things I didn’t really care for/want to do because I was expected to do them and whenever I expressed that I didn’t care for them people told me I was broken and there was something wrong with me . . .

(What? They said “there was something wrong with” you? Why would anyone think there was something wrong with a demi-romantic asexual? Gosh, ma’am, this is completely mystifying to me.)

Pretty much when I figured out and accepted I was ace I figured I was most likely panromantic because if sex doesn’t apply, why should gender? And I was proven right which was mostly cool because the butterflies and excitement of actually liking someone romantically is super interesting and cool to me. I’m still basically refusing to actually attempt to date anyone or even think about it because I don’t trust allosexual people not to try to manipulate me or resent me (BECAUSE IT HAPPENS EVERY F–KING TIME BECAUSE OUR CULTURE MAKES US THINK THAT IF YOU DON’T F–K SOMEONE YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT THEM WHICH IS SUCH BULLSH*T, OKAY??!!?! ALSO THAT PEOPLE ARE OWED SEX WHICH IS LIKE, WOW, NO F–K OFF) so even if I end up liking someone irl (which hasn’t happened yet but that’s probably a good thing) it probably will not be a good idea for me. Hooray. Anyway, I’m cool with it, I’m a very goal-oriented person and I have a super awesome best friend and really cool friends through here and FRIENDSHIP IS F–KING AWESOME. So. Uh. Yeah.

You can read lots more about her asexuality at her blog, just in case you haven’t been getting enough existential despair lately.

Cruel sarcasm may not be the most enlightened way to react to this, but what else can we do? Life was a lot more fun back in 1975 even if all we had was 8-track tapes and Earth Shoes. Were there angry asexuals in 1975? Probably, but there was no Tumblr to tell them they were “asexual” or “panromantic” and the rest of us just avoided weirdos like that.

I always think of Glenn Reynolds’s phrase “Broken People” — he was talking about Kate Millett — when I encounter this kind of RAVING IN ALL CAPS WITH LOTS OF FOUR-LETTER WORDS feminist rage.

You don’t need an advanced theory or a Ph.D. from Temple University to explain everything that’s wrong in the world. Some people are just weirdos, and maybe a visit to an endocrinologist — a thyroid problem? some sort of vitamin deficiency? — could help them, or maybe not.

There are plenty of passengers on the express train to Crazy Cat Lady Land nowadays, and nobody in the scientific community seems interested in researching this phenomenon. Why? Because feminists blame it all on the heteronormative patriarchy, and if you doubt their explanation, they’ll start SHOUTING IN CAPITAL LETTERS ABOUT WHAT AN OPPRESSIVE MISOGYNIST F–KBOY YOU ARE.

Feminism is mental illness disguised as a political movement.




 

Category: Sex Trouble

You Are Your Own Problem

Posted on | March 18, 2016 | 28 Comments

To follow up on the Tumblr feminist whose examination of OKCupid caused her to “reach the unfortunate conclusion that almost every man in this world is completely intellectually and spiritually void,” let me reiterate this: People are responsible for their relationships.

We do not live in a medieval society where the scions of dynasties are forced to marry the heiresses of other dynasties in order to advance their families’ political and economic interests. Given the wreck and ruin so many young people make of their romantic lives, perhaps a return to arranged marriages wouldn’t be such a bad idea, but as it is, everyone in America 18 or older is entirely free to choose their own partners — or get on feminist Tumblr and become a crazy cat lady.

Freedom and responsibility are inseparable, but our culture today does not teach young people what responsibility means. Between the influence of media, careless parenting, and the government-run education system, America is producing a generation of irresponsible narcissists who think they are being oppressed if anyone criticizes their selfish hedonism. Therefore, permit me to quote a great poet:

Try to get yourself a bargain son.
Don’t be sold on the very first one.
Pretty girls come a dime a dozen,
Try to find one who’s gonna give you true lovin’.
Before you take a girl and say I do, now,
Make sure she’s in love with you now.
My mama told me, “You better shop around.”

Thus spake Smokey Robinson, the poet laureate of soul, and this timeless wisdom must be passed along to future generations. Last year, the leading Men’s Rights Activist (MRA) Paul Elam acknowledged the fact that “many personality disordered women have especially honed skills at ‘fooling’ their target into thinking they are something they are not”:

They have refined expertise in figuring out what makes you tick and indeed an uncanny ability to project precisely what they know you want to see and hear.
They are the master of the Love Bomb and will pile on adulation and admiration from the earliest moments in the relationship, almost smothering you in unconditional approval. . . .
With some rare exceptions, men can screen out high-conflict, high-maintenance, high-frustration and high-danger women with a relatively small amount of consciousness and the willingness to accept responsibility for their own choices.
For some men that means taking a rather bitter dose of medicine in the form of the truth.

You can read the whole thing. What is important — whether you are male or female — is that young people learn to accept their own shortcomings and failures, and thus avoid the psychological trap of rationalization and scapegoating. A genuinely wise young person, I would argue, should recognize not only the timeless truths of Motown, but also of Christianity. The Golden Rule is a sound moral precept, and one of the greatest truths you can ever learn is this: “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” (Hint: Charlie Sheen.)

A young man who imagines he can go out “playing the field” and leave a string of broken hearts behind him without consequence is a fool. Sooner or later, his luck will run out, and when the Million-Pound Sh*thammer comes smashing down on him, the fool thinks he is an innocent victim.

Justice delayed is not always justice denied. When the evil you do comes boomeranging back to whack you upside your foolish head, you may not recognize this as repayment for the wrong you did others long ago. Therefore, pray that God will protect and guide you: “Get wisdom, get understanding . . . Forsake her not, and she shall preserve thee.” And learn to be grateful to God for every lesson you learn the hard way. “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.”

When I was 18, I fell hopelessly in love with a girl and was this close to an irrevocable commitment. Alas, like Othello, I loved not wisely, but too well, and was ruined by my own impatience. One night I had returned home from college expecting a date with my beloved, who inexplicably was kept home by her mother. My pride injured — although she assured me no such injury was intended, and that it was only at her mother’s behest that she could not go to the dance — I determined to find companionship elsewhere. Well, if any young fools haven’t figured this out yet, let me set you wise: Girls talk.

That was how I got my heart broken — for my beloved would not forgive me kissing that talkative girl — and I had no one to blame but myself. “Nobody’s fault but mine,” to quote another great poet of that era.

In hindsight, I should thank God, for I dodged a bullet, escaping a tragic outcome, had that teenage romance proceeded to consummation. Oh, friends, I had been this close and in those days I was to seduction what Gretzky was to hockey: “He shoots! He scores!” But this was not to be, and you may not believe in God, but whatever you call it — fate, destiny, karma — the transcendent and cosmic purpose of life was at work.

No broken-hearted 18-year-old wants to hear that, of course. Deeply hurt, I became embittered and my pain made me quite cynical.

Oh, romantic embers still glowed somewhere in my heart, but my mind became ice-cold. Looking back at the ensuing decade and the emotional debris left scattered in my wake, I can count two or three girlfriends who actually hurt me, but the much higher tally on the other side of the board haunts my conscience. Better to suffer an emotional injury than to inflict it, however accidental the harm may be. Emotional bonds develop no matter how we may seek to evade them, and what were we doing back then? A legendary poet perhaps said it best:

We weren’t in love.
Oh, no, far from it.
We weren’t searching for some
Pie-in-the-sky summit.
We were just young and restless and bored,
Living by the sword. . . .
I used her, she used me,
But neither one cared.
We were getting our share.
Working on our night moves.

Yeah, “getting our share” — selfish hedonism — may seem harmless, and if everybody’s doing it . . . Well, it was the ’70s and I was a Democrat then.

There was, however, a nice Republican girl whose existence I never even imagined back in those days. She was not only a Republican, but a Christian from a pietistic sect that frowned on the sins of dancing, alcohol and tobacco, to say nothing of my other favorite amusements. And by the time fate or destiny or whatever resulted in our meeting one autumn evening in 1987, I had “looked around enough to know,” to quote another poet, and pretty soon I found that I had “fooled around and fell in love.”

“Just win, baby” — that’s what Al Davis told his famous Oakland Raiders, and when the coach sends you into the championship game, you’d better be ready to play for keeps. A good Christian wife? Boy, when God answers your prayers, despite every reason He might have to ignore your prayers, it’s time to buckle up your chinstrap and win.

By May 1989, I was a married man and the father of a baby daughter, and here I am nearly 27 years later, a father of six and grandfather of two.

 

No one who knew me when I was in college and living The Democrat Lifestyle™ ever would have predicted this. Our firstborn girl we named Kennedy — my idea — but I promised my Republican wife that our next daughter would be named Reagan. Four sons later, she arrived.

Thursday our miraculous daughter Reagan, now a seventh-grader, gave a presentation at school about Ronald Reagan. The students were required to dress up as the historic person they were presenting.

So there she is, Reagan McCain, who knows about “A Time For Choosing” and “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and can even tell you a thing or two about President Reagan’s economic policies. She is keenly intelligent, scoring 99th percentile on the ITBS. Her brains and her beauty are likewise hereditary — some would say the latter trait is owed entirely to her mother’s side of the family — and Reagan has been quite thoroughly schooled in the deadly menace of Communism and its 21st-century manifestation, Crazy Cat Lady-ism. Her extraordinary intelligence notwithstanding, Reagan will not go to Harvard — dear God, not Harvard — nor shall she fall prey to The Godless Men at Yale. Were it up to me, she would attend the University of Alabama (Roll Tide!), but if I should die tomorrow, let my final wish be recorded that Reagan (and all my other descendants, forever) shall stay far away from the Ivy League, which is Decadent and Depraved. Amen and selah.

Freedom and responsibility are inseparable. My responsibility as a parent requires me not only to warn my sons against those “high-conflict, high-maintenance, high-frustration and high-danger women” described by Paul Elam, but also to raise daughters as good as their mother. (Perhaps no one could ever be that good, but this is the goal we aim toward.) My old friend, the novelist Tito Perdue, an erudite man steeped in classical learning, once mentioned to me the legendary valor of the ancient warriors of Sparta, who died to the last man at Thermopylae. “How many Spartans would it take,” Tito asked, “to overthrow this whole rotten modern culture? Ten thousand? Five hundred? One?”

And where is that mighty hero of antique courage? He is not whimpering and whining because he can’t find a girlfriend, I’ll tell you that much.

Winners win and losers lose. Freedom requires responsibility, and fellows must cease this pathetic nonsense of complaining about the results of their own folly. If a fool gets himself mixed up with a Pretty Little Liar, whose fault is that? Do not blame her. You are your own problem.

You will find no heroes on OKCupid or Tinder. Nor does the young hero squander his time playing videogames or watching TV when he should be hitting the gym, studying history, or reading his Bible.

Stand up! Stand up for Jesus,
Ye soldiers of the Cross!
Lift high His royal banner,
It must not suffer loss.

Yes, I am too well aware that many readers who have supported my research into radical feminism are not Christians. Many critics of feminism are secular humanists or even avowed pagans, and I will not offend you by preaching any sermons today. The Camp of the Saints is encompassed about with enemies, so that God calls everyone who can fight to join this battle, and let every man hear Christ the eternal King speak now as did Henry at Agincourt on St. Cripin’s Day:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

There will be time enough to discuss theology after the battle is won, when the heroic victors in this War of Ideas — lest anyone misunderstand my martial rhetoric — shall wear upon their brows the laurel crown.

Is every man in this world completely intellectually and spiritually void? No, ma’am, we are not. Some of us yet have poetry in our souls.

We are quite old-fashioned, almost medieval you might say, in our devotion to ancient customs and creeds, to ideas of duty and honor that the modern world does not know. Some young men are still romantic, although respectful and wise, for the hero must eschew The Democrat Lifestyle™ if he would serve in this army. Love conquers all, and fate can sometimes arrange things in ways that seem quite miraculous. Let us close today’s service, therefore, with inspirational music.

Perhaps you don’t believe in miracles, but as for me, I have seen Smokey Robinson and the Miracles with my own eyes. Selah.




 

 


Category: Sex Trouble
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