The Other McCain

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

‘The Stars Aligned’

Posted on | November 22, 2015 | 29 Comments

Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” is one of those songs I never get tired of hearing. I seldom listen to contemporary pop music, preferring old rock and soul classics of the 1960s and ’70s, but “Rolling in the Deep” is an exception. In a BBC interview, the British singer explained how she suddenly gained worldwide fame in 2008:

“The week I was doing Saturday Night Live, it was meant to be a normal week but the week after, Sarah Palin was supposed to do it, . . . Because something came up in the campaign, she came and did the week I was doing it with Josh Brolin. So it was one of the most watched SNLs ever, and then it was two weeks before the Grammy ballot, which is when people decide what songs they want to maybe nominate, so, like, literally the stars aligned for me. . . . All thanks to Sarah Palin.”

After Adele performed for that huge audience, her album hit number one and she was nominated for four Grammys. Sarah Palin recently sent Adele a copy of her new book, Sweet Freedom: A Devotional, penning this autographed inscription:

“Adele, You look so great! So beautiful! So . . . Rumor Has It you recently threw me some credit for your amazing success — very kind coming from Someone Like You! Congrats on motherhood. Keep Setting Fire to the Rain.
Love, your fan
Sarah Palin”

As Paul Harvey would say, now you know the rest of the story.

(Via Memeorandum.)

 

Category: Music, Sarah Palin

Is Your Kid a Weirdo?

Posted on | November 21, 2015 | 146 Comments

 

America is in the grip of a crisis, namely a shortage of normal people. Evidence indicates that the population of kooks and freaks is rapidly increasing, and there are simply not enough sane people to keep the weirdos under control. Especially among the under-30 demographic, the United States is struggling to cope with the proliferation of dangerous perverts, drug addicts, psychotics and Ivy League liberal arts majors:

A student at Columbia University is urging the school to inject more diversity into its required courses, claiming she suffered severe emotional trauma from reading too many books by and about white people.
Columbia students and faculty gathered Wednesday night for a panel discussion on “Race, Ethnicity, and University Life.” . . .
One of the panelists at the event was black Columbia student Nissy Aya. Aya was supposed to graduate in 2014, but instead is only on track to receive her degree in 2016. That, Aya says, demonstrates “how hard it has been for me to get through this institution” . . .
Aya attributed some of her academic troubles to the trauma of having to take Columbia’s current Core Curriculum, which requires students to take a series of six classes with a focus on the culture and history of Western, European civilization. . . .
“It’s traumatizing to sit in Core classes,” she said. “We are looking at history through the lens of these powerful, white men. I have no power or agency as a black woman, so where do I fit in?”

If you can afford to attend Columbia University (annual tuition $51,008), you are not an oppressed victim of society. A student at an elite university who believes she is being “traumatized” by the curriculum is delusional — she is demented, deranged, mad, zany, wacky, off her rocker, and a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

Everybody knows that Columbia attracts fruitcakes and dingbats. The alumni include Megan McCain and Barack Obama, after all. Unfortunately, this weirdo trend is not limited to the Ivy League elite. A poll finds that 40% of “Millennials” (ages 18-34) support prohibiting “statements that are offensive to minorities.” Everything written by “powerful, white men” (Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Hume, Locke, Madison, Burke, et al.) might eventually be banned as “hate speech,” in order to avoid “traumatizing” fragile neurotics like Nissy Aya.

Parents need to be aware that their children could be swept up in this pandemic insanity, which is highly contagious. Monitor your child’s psychological health by asking questions like, “Are you victimized by oppressive gender norms?” and, “Do you need a trigger warning before you read Shakespeare?” If a kid answers “yes” to questions like that — or if they dye their hair cerulean blue and start whining about “objectification” in video games — this indicates your child may be at risk of becoming a weirdo afflicted with Special Snowflake™ Syndrome.

Characteristically, these weirdos believe they are entitled to whatever they want, whether it is a Columbia diploma or better media “representation” of their sexual identity. The Special Snowflake™ is typically a privileged young person who identifies as a victim, either because of their race, their sexual orientation, or whatever mental illness (depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, etc.) they self-diagnosed based on a list of symptoms they read on a  blog. Your kid may seem perfectly fine — an honor student with lots of friends, cheerfully involved in extracurricular activities — and then quite suddenly, for no apparent reason, she starts moping around, wearing bizarre clothes, and grumbling about how she’s oppressed by the patriarchy.

Consider the case of a teenage girl, the daughter of two successful lawyers, who became convinced she was a victim of society:

I’ve never felt quite like a woman, but I’ve never wanted to be a man, either. . . .
I discovered my mistake one day in junior school, when a few of the girls in my class were chatting about what boys they fancied. . . . Even back then, there was something odd about me, a strangeness . . .
I couldn’t think of anything to say that would be both interesting and true. So I mentioned that I often felt like I was a gay boy in a girl’s body. Just like everyone else, right?
I could tell from their faces that this was not right. It was very, very wrong. . . .
I often wished I was a lesbian. But I almost always fancied boys, and if you fancied boys, you had to behave like a girl. And behaving like a girl was the one subject, apart from sports, that I always failed. . . .
I was anorexic for large parts of my childhood and for many complex, painful, altogether common reasons, of which gender dysphoria was just one. I felt trapped by the femaleness of my body, by my growing breasts and curves. Not eating made my periods stop. It made my breasts disappear. On the downside, it also turned me into a manic, suicidal mess, forced me to drop out of school, and traumatized my entire family.
At 17, I wound up in the hospital, in an acute eating disorders ward, where I stayed for six months. . . .
I was bisexual, and I was very much hoping that one day when I wasn’t quite so weird and sad I’d be able to test the theory in practice. . . .
I got better. . . . I left the trauma of the hospital far behind me and tried to cover up my past with skirts and makeup. . . .
At 24, I wrote columns about abortion rights and sexual liberation, and books about how to live and love under capitalist patriarchy. In response, young women wrote to me on a regular basis telling me that my work helped inspire them to live more freely in their femaleness. They admired me because I was a “strong woman.” Would I be betraying those girls if I admitted that half the time, I didn’t feel like a woman at all? . . .
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, of misogyny, of the way we are all worked over by gender in the end. . . .
Questioning gender . . . is an essential part of the feminism that has sustained me through two decades of personal and political struggle.

 

Yes, Laurie Penny became “genderqueer,” and is now one of the World’s Most Famous Victims of Heteropatriarchal Oppression.

Victimhood can be quite a lucrative racket for a privileged Special Snowflake™ like Laurie Penny (who graduated from Oxford University and recently completed a prestigious Nieman fellowship at Harvard) but most weirdos cannot cash in so easily on their grandiose delusions of persecution. In fact, a kid who succumbs to this entitlement mentality could get arrested in Pocatello, Idaho:

An Idaho school was placed on lockdown after a student threatened to “kill all the girls” because none of them would send him nude photos.
A 15-year-old boy was charged with one count each of threatening violence at a school and telephone harassment in connection with the threats — which spread quickly across social media Wednesday morning and were then reported to officials at the Pocatello/Chubbuck School District.
Police immediately initiated a controlled access code at Highland High School as officers investigated the threat.
“Some kid who was having attention problems with specifically the cheerleaders, didn’t get nudes,” said student Isaac Gomez. . . .
A screenshot posted online by KIDK-TV appears to show a text message conversation between the teen and a friend who tries to talk the boy out of his violent plot, which he intended to carry out about 9:30 a.m. Friday.
“(I’m) serious I have a 12 gauge shotgun and a 9 mm pistol I will bring and start killing everyone,” one message said. “I also have hunting knives I can bring.” . . .
Additional messages between the teen and his friend suggested his motivation for wanting to kill girls at his school.
“This,” the friend texted, “Over freaking nudes? Dude.”
“Because no one will give any to me,” the teen complained. “Every one hates me. And I hate (one particular girl). And I will kill myself after.”

You see the pattern? Nissy Aya is “traumatized” because Columbia University requires her to read about white males. Laurie Penny is “traumatized” because of the gender that society “violently imposed” on her. And this 15-year-old boy in Pocatello, Idaho, was traumatized because the cheerleaders wouldn’t send him any freaking nudes.

Weirdos have always been dangerous, but now the weirdos are trying to take over society — in the Ivy League, at BuzzFeed, in Idaho — and there are not enough normal people to stop them.

These weirdos are not victims of society. They are the products of inadequate parenting, and our civilization is slowly being destroyed because of the petulant tantrums of whiny brats whose parents lacked the courage to tell their spoiled offspring that the world is not obligated to indulge your hurt feelings. When adults abdicate authority, children never learn to respect others or accept personal responsibility. And so the “broken people” are everywhere nowadays . . .

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Can you guess the favorite presidential candidate of Generation Weirdo?




 

Category: Education, Sex Trouble

Quotable Jonah

Posted on | November 21, 2015 | 27 Comments

by Smitty

What I find interesting is that many of the same people who clutch their pearls at the mere suggestion that Islamic terrorism has anything to do with — oh, what’s the word again? — oh right: Islam, seem to have no problem making the case that “Christian terrorism” is like a real thing. Remember how so many liberals loved — loved — Obama’s sophomoric and insidious tirade about not getting on our “high horses” about ISIS’s atrocities in the here and now because medieval Christians did bad things a thousand years ago? They never seem to think that argument through. Leaving out the ass-aching stupidity of the comparison, it actually concedes the very point Obama never wants to concede. By laying the barbaric sins of Christians a thousand years ago at the feet of Christians today, he implicitly tags Muslims with the barbarism committed in their name today.

Modern politics grew more coherent, if not rational, when I realized that discussions like terrorism or the Syrian refugee crisis are all hormone-flinging directed at the flesh. Your Progressive overlords think you’re stupid, and will attempt to herd you with guilt, fear, and bribes to Do What They Say.

Conversely, there is shag-all interest in rational discussion, analysis, and a dispassionate effort at finding an optimal overall solution. “They never seem to think that argument through” because #ShutUp. There is power to be protected here, and allowing any sort of intellectual exchange is a direct threat to that power.

As explained by Thurston the Presidential Lip Fly:

 

Category: Culture

On ‘Fragile Masculinity’

Posted on | November 20, 2015 | 43 Comments

Sarah Taylor Gibson (@s_t_gibson on Twitter) is a young Christian college student who also calls herself a feminist, evidently having failed to understand what feminism actually requires.

“There are no Christian feminists, because feminism is a sort of narcissistic idolatry, wherein women deny God and instead worship themselves as their own divinity.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Dec. 17

Feminism permits women to view their own selfishness as altruism. Feminism also justifies cruelty and dishonesty. By telling themselves that they are oppressed — and that males are both the perpetrators and beneficiaries of systematic injustice against them — feminists grant themselves a license to be deliberately cruel toward men because all men are oppressors and thus deserving of such cruelty. Feminism is a radical egalitarian ideology that tells women “equality” is the only true moral ideal (the summum bonum), a goal which can only be achieved by the destruction of a social order that feminist theory condemns as a manifestation of male supremacy. Everything men do is wrong — an exercise of unjust privilege — and nothing any man says is valid. Because its condemnation of males is without limit or qualification (all men are guilty of oppression, simply because they are male) feminist theory destroys any basis of trust, respect or cooperation between the sexes. Yet feminists typically deny the implications of their own theory, resorting to dishonest sophistry to conceal from critical scrutiny what feminism really means. Feminists refuse to debate their critics, instead seeking to silence all opposition, especially in media and academia. Because the movement’s naïve young followers never encounter any articulate criticism of their ideology, they seem to imagine that all intelligent people support the feminist cause.

Here is a Tumblr mini-lecture from Sarah Taylor Gibson:

What perplexes me the most about the fragile masculinity of straight men is the fact that machismo is not what women want. Lets look, for example, to the men girls have plastered all over their bedroom walls in highschool. What could be a better insight into the deeply personal sexual psyche of a girl figuring out what she wants? Sometimes the posters are of jacked action movie heroes or football players, but I would argue you’re more likely to find those in a boy’s room, not a girls. When I remember my friend’s bedrooms in highschool, I remember willowy anime heartthrobs, singer-songwriters in eyeliner and tight jeans, soft-lipped big-eyed child idols, and rock stars that kissed other boys on stage. When I think of the two biggest movie dreamboats from the 2000s I think of Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean and Legolas from Lord of the Rings. Every other girl in my high school had posters over her bed of a swaggering trinket-laden trickster diva and a flawlessly blonde gymnastically graceful Elvin beauty. Both excellent examples of masculinity, neither at all traditionally macho.
It’s almost like boys model their sexual expression off what other men perform for one another instead of actually listening to what women want or, God forbid, performing their own personality.

Notice how easily Ms. Gibson arrogates to herself the authority of an expert, qualified to issue sweeping condemnations of male behavior. Feminists do this routinely, never expecting anyone to challenge their judgment or demand any credentials. Any college girl can just log onto the Internet and deliver such indictments of males without fear that anyone might question her analysis. Ms. Gibson knows “what most women want” and yet “straight men,” whom she diagnoses as afflicted with “fragile masculinity,” instead foolishly pursue “traditionally macho” behavior as a “model [for] their sexual expression.” Why do men do this? Because, Ms. Gibson informs us, men refuse to listen to women.

Translation: Guys are so stupid they don’t even know how to be guys and therefore they need feminists to tell them how to do it.

Ms. Gibson perfectly expresses the feminist presumption that not only are all males inadequate and incompetent, incapable of doing anything right, but also that males are so ignorant they do not even realize why everything they do is wrong. Men are mentally inferior and lack any capacity for self-awareness, the feminist believes. No one ever points out to Ms. Gibson that her beliefs amount to an insulting anti-male prejudice.

Notice how it is only “straight men” whom Ms. Gibson condemns for their “fragile masculinity,” implying that the masculinity of homosexual men is robust and healthy by comparison. Furthermore, notice how Ms. Gibson assumes that “traditionally macho” behavior is never authentic, but is rather always a performance, an artificial façade that does not reflect a man’s “own personality.” Insofar as any heterosexual man behaves “traditionally,” Ms. Gibson would have us believe, this can only be explained by his mimicking the “sexual expression” of other men — perhaps “movie heroes or football players” — because there can be no such thing as original and authentic “machismo.”

Instead, we are informed, men should be “willowy anime heartthrobs, singer-songwriters in eyeliner and tight jeans, soft-lipped big-eyed child idols, and rock stars that kissed other boys on stage,” because this is what women actually want men to be, based on Ms. Gibson’s memory of posters with which high school girls decorated their bedrooms.

And if any man should express doubt about the validity of Ms. Gibson’s judgment? Well, that’s just evidence of his “fragile masculinity.”

Feminists know everything, you see, and men know nothing, which is why feminist discourse is always a lecture, never a dialogue. This is probably also why feminists assume all men are hopelessly stupid, because smart men avoid feminists. Why would any intelligent man with a modicum of self-respect subject himself to such insulting treatment? Only a masochist with a damaged ego and a craving for humiliation would associate with a woman who never says a word to him except to belittle him, bossing him around as if he had no will of his own.

As to why so many teenage girls prefer pouty “sensitive”-looking boys, psychologists long ago explained this as a manifestation of sexual immaturity. Conventionally masculine adult males are too intimidating for the adolescent female to imagine them as romantic partners. The implications of her own role in a relationship with such an imposing figure — what it would mean to be a man’s partner — understandably frighten the girl; it is more comfortable to focus her affection on a somewhat effeminate boy/man. Indeed, from the perspective of developmental psychology, it might be considered inappropriate if a 13- or 14-year-old girl chose an overtly “macho” romantic idol. However, it is even more inappropriate to expect adult men to conform their behavior so as to appeal to the immature emotional needs of adolescent girls, and yet Ms. Gibson sees no problem in demanding that men emulate “excellent examples of masculinity” like a make-believe pirate from a Disney movie or an elf-prince from Middle Earth.

We see, then, why feminism’s one-sided analysis of sexual behavior is so misleading. The feminist is always willing to excuse women’s immature attitudes and selfish behaviors; because every woman is a victim of oppression, she is therefore never responsible for her faults and failures. Exempting herself from critical scrutiny, the feminist then proceeds to pronounce insulting judgments against men and, if they should object to her criticism, she interprets his objection as proof of his misogyny. Merely disagreeing with a feminist proves that he hates women and, therefore, his objections are automatically invalidated.

The circular logic of Lewis’s Law, whereby opposition to feminism is cited as a justification for feminism, should raise the question of why feminism inspires so much opposition. The obvious answer is that men do not enjoy being rudely insulted, told that they are deserving of no respect or consideration. What have I done — or what have my sons done — to be subjected to such hateful rhetoric? And what has Helen Lewis ever done that qualifies her to stand in judgment of anyone?

No one ever questions feminist authority. Nowadays, it is just assumed that all men should be treated with scornful contempt, merely because they are male. The ideological basis of this assumption — i.e., that men deserve such treatment because they are perpetrators of unjust oppression — is never disputed, although it is difficult to find any objective evidence of this. How is it, after all, that complaints about women’s oppression are most often heard from women who are themselves manifestly privileged? And how are we to supposed to interpret the fact that the majority of college students (57%) are women? If this is oppression, then what would equality look like? Will women finally consider themselves “equal” if they are 75% or 80% of college students, or is anything short of 100% unacceptable to feminists?

These questions are never asked, however, because no one on the 21st-century campus is permitted to do anything other than nod in agreement when feminists speak. A college student like Sarah Taylor Gibson probably doesn’t even think of feminism as a political ideology, but rather accepts it as reality, the only valid way of understanding human behavior. The fact that feminism is epistemologically incompatible with Christianity is either not yet apparent to her or else she is unwilling to alienate her Christian parents by admitting her apostasy.

What Ms. Gibson fails to see is that the “equality” demanded by feminism requires us to deny the actual differences between men and woman, thus to bring about an androgynous utopia. No such society has ever existed in human history, of course, nor will it ever exist at any time in the future. Feminism is as incompatible with human nature as it is with Christian theology, and yet neither science nor faith can dissuade Ms. Gibson from embracing the folly of feminism, which flatters her vanity in much the same way as the serpent beguiled Eve: “Ye shall be as gods!”





 

Category: Sex Trouble

Taiwanese Animators Own Her Majesty

Posted on | November 20, 2015 | 7 Comments

by Smitty

This one just keeps getting better. Bravo zulu, ye mighty animators!

Category: Hillary Clinton, Video

‘Rape Culture’ as Stalinism: Propaganda Tactics by ‘Hunting Ground’ Makers

Posted on | November 20, 2015 | 39 Comments

Erica Kinsman is featured in The Hunting Ground.

“All these people were praising him; they were calling me a slut, a whore. . . .I kind of just want to know, like, why me?”
— Erica Kinsman

Even while the new movie Trumbo engages in a whitewash of a notorious Communist, dishonest Stalin-era Soviet propaganda tactics have been given a new digital-age update by feminists:

A crew member from “The Hunting Ground,” a one-sided film about campus sexual assault, has been editing Wikipedia articles to make facts conform with the inaccurate representations in the film.
Edward Patrick Alva, who is listed on the film’s IMDB page as part of the camera and electrical department, has been altering Wikipedia entries for months, in violation of the website’s conflict-of-interest guidelines. Alva is the assistant editor and technical supervisor for Chain Camera Pictures, the production company associated with “The Hunting Ground” director Kirby Dick. . . .
Alva created his Wikipedia account just two weeks after Florida State University President John Thrasher first called out the filmmakers for their inaccurate and unfair portrayal of the school and its handling of the rape accusation against former star quarterback Jameis Winston. . . .
Nearly all of Alva’s Wikipedia edits have related to “The Hunting Ground,” either through edits to the film’s main Wikipedia page or through edits to the pages of some of the people featured in the film.
Alva took particular interest in editing the Wikipedia page of Jameis Winston, the only person named in the film as an alleged rapist. Winston was cleared by three separate investigations, yet activists — and the film — claim this was due to a biased process and investigators seeking to protect a star football player. The film doesn’t mention the holes in Erica Kinsman’s accusation against Winston and in fact allows her to tell a story that contradicts physical evidence. . . .
The film itself is inaccurate, as the president of FSU and 19 Harvard Law professors have noted. The film distorts the evidence and uses false statistics to paint a picture of a rape epidemic at American universities. (Despite the filmmakers insistence that it is a documentary and “completely accurate,” emails between an investigator for the film and the lawyer of one of the accusers strongly suggest otherwise.) . . .

Read the rest by Ashe Schow at the Washington Examiner.

The issue here is not whether we believe Jameis Winston is innocent, but instead whether The Hunting Ground accurately depicts the Winston case, which in turn leads to the question of whether the film accurately depicts the general situation on America’s university campuses. If we catch the producers of a documentary telling a false version of one incident, we are entitled to doubt the truth of their general portrayal of the larger phenomenon (the so-called “rape culture” on campus) that is the subject of their film. And when a member of The Hunting Ground‘s crew subsequently attempts to alter the online record and delete criticism of the film — a trick reminiscent of Soviet propagandists airbrushing Leon Trotsky out of photos of the Bolshevik leadership — we may indeed wonder if this “documentary” is fundamentally dishonest:

Amid a growing controversy involving questions of accuracy and fairness, the makers of The Hunting Ground, a documentary indictment of campus sexual assaults, are defending the film, which is set to air on CNN on Nov. 22.
Florida State University, where one of the cases depicted in the documentary occurred, has asked the news network not to air the film and has produced a detailed critique of what it alleges are instances of inaccuracy and unfairness that depart from standard journalistic practice.
In response, CNN — which also will air a roundtable discussion of campus sexual assaults after it airs the film — said it is “proud to provide a platform for a film that has undeniably played a significant role in advancing the national conversation about sexual assault on college campuses.”

CNN is dedicated to “advancing the national conversation,” even if it has to tell lies to do it. But do they really want a conversation or is this actually a one-sided propaganda lecture? Because a conversation might include questions like, why were two minors — Erica Kinsman and Jameis Winston were both 18 — being served alcohol in a Tallahassee bar on the night of Dec. 7, 2012? Why did Kinsman leave the bar in a cab with Winston and two other men and go back to Winston’s apartment? She claims somebody put a drug in one of her drinks, but the toxicology report showed no evidence of any drug. And let me repeat again: The issue is not whether Jameis Winston is innocent, but whether the case is presented accurately in The Hunting Ground.

The producers of this documentary claim that the Jameis Winston case is emblematic of a larger “rape culture” on our nation’s university campuses. If female students are indeed routinely victimized by such an “epidemic” of sexual assault, we might suppose, The Hunting Ground‘s producers would have many clear-cut cases to choose from and, by devoting a major segment of their film to the Jameis Winston case, they imply that the failure of officials to punish the FSU star athlete is self-evidently an injustice. Yet when we look at the facts of the case, reasonable doubts are immediately apparent. There is no evidence Erica Kinsman was drugged. She and Winston were both underage and drinking in a bar. There is no evidence that she was coerced to leave the bar with him, nor any evidence that he forced her to go back to his apartment.

If these reasonable doubts are apparent, we must nonetheless ask why Erica Kinsman immediately claimed she had been raped. Unlike many other cases that have come to light, there was no dubious delay in her accusation. This wasn’t like the infamous Columbia University “Mattress Girl” case where Emma Sulkowicz waited several months to claim Paul Nungesser had raped her. No, Erica Kinsman went to the hospital and reported that she was raped, an accusation the Tallahassee police were required to investigate. The alleged inadequacy of that investigation, and claims that police and university officials conspired to protect Jameis Winston, are the real issue in this case. But does anyone want to dig down into the, uh, racial subtext of this case? Is it merely a coincidence that the producers of this documentary focused so much attention on a blonde girl claiming she was raped by a black man?

We could speculate about such factors. We could wonder what an 18-year-old girl expects will happen when she goes back to the apartment of a guy she met in a bar. We can speculate what a 6-foot-4, 227-pound star athlete like Jameis Winston might have expected to happen in that situation. It is reasonable to speculate that (a) his expectations and her expectations were not exactly the same, and (b) Erica Kinsman was not prepared to deal with the consequences of her own decisions.

Are such speculations inappropriate? Perhaps. Yet if CNN wants to generate a “national conversation about sexual assault on college campuses,” they cannot silence the voices of those who see these kinds of reasonable doubts. And let the record show that there have been allegations that Jameis Winston was the target of a shakedown:

Jameis Winston’s lawyer has fired off a letter to Florida State University … claiming the woman who accused his client of rape demanded $7 MILLION to buy her silence.
David Cornwell, the lawyer for the Heisman Trophy winner, sent a letter to FSU, saying Winston will fully cooperate with the University’s ongoing investigation into the handling of the rape charges. The alleged victim claims the University engaged in sexual discrimination by sweeping her claims under the rug to protect its prized athlete.
According to the letter — obtained by TMZ Sports — the alleged victim’s lawyer, Patricia Carroll, demanded $7 MIL to settle her client’s claims against FSU and Winston, telling Cornwell, “If we settle, you will never hear from my client or me again — in the press or anywhere.”
Cornwell says he rejected her offer and 4 days later she went to the media.
Cornwell also says Carroll claimed her client’s sexual encounter had to be rape, because she would never sleep with a “black boy.” Fact is … the alleged victim’s boyfriend at the time was black. The criminal case fell apart, partly because the alleged victim had semen from 2 different men on her shorts.

Will CNN address that claim in their “national conversation”?

Probably not. Because they don’t really want a conversation.




 

Category: CNN, Sex Trouble

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | November 20, 2015 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

“The natives probably had some rituals surrounding the berry harvest.”

“You mean your people don’t even use this?”

“What for? We shop at the big box store like everyone else.”

“Whatever. We’ve already talked about the funky native attire–”

“That Chinese supplier says they can deliver by the end of January.”

“Excellent. We’ll bring in a choreographer to give you some suitably primitive, semi-erotic, yet family-friendly dance moves.”

“OK.”

“And then you’ll need to fake some tradition about the berries. Do you guys make any sort of moonshine?”

“We. . .don’t do alcohol well. Not even for Economic Development Consultants.”

via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction, Uncategorized

Barney Frank Channels The Onion

Posted on | November 19, 2015 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

Barney Frank epitomizes the basic religious belief in government that has led to the success of large scale endeavors throughout human history such as the Tower of Babel and the United Nations.

But there’s another, perhaps deeper reason, one that’s both a cause and an effect of the political dysfunction from which we now suffer: a sharp decline in the public’s belief that government works.

If you’ll permit me a scatalogical reference, Frank is merely echoing a 1998 article from the Onion, with a steamingly prophetic faux-quote from then-Senatorial knob John Kerry:

Calling the American people’s enormous s**t-belief capacity “one of the cornerstones of our democracy,” U.S. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) stressed that it is the patriotic duty of all citizens to grant our leaders the benefit of the doubt with regard to their s**t.
“If the American people are no longer willing to believe this s**t, who will?” Kerry said. “Somebody’s got to take this s**t at face value. Otherwise, why are we even doing all this s**t in the first place? I am truly saddened by the lack of faith that the citizens of this country are willing to put in my s**t, as well as that of my esteemed colleagues. We must repair our society’s fraying trust in the s**t of our elected officials, or you would not believe the kind of hardcore, heavy-duty s**t that will come down.”

Sorry, Barney. There is nothing ennobling about politics. No amount of wishful thinking on your part can turn the anything we do together into an instrument of human redemption. Quite to the contrary: the virtue of the government, as a whole, and akin to the resistance in a parallel circuit, is just a little less than the worst example among them. But why mention Her Majesty?

So, should we be buying Frank’s nonsense? Why, no: no, we should not. Instead, we need to let the Information Age revolution transform government as much as it has the private sector. In some glorious future, all legislation will be done in the style of GitHub, and every paying customer (that’s YOU) should have read-only access to be able to track the pedigree and detail of every piece of legislation of interest.

Put all the scoring work for the legislation out there, too.

Fundamentally, the Barney Franks of the world forget that American Exceptionalism means the government works for us, not the reverse.

That sort of practical transparency would imply that all of the non-enumerated power hooey that the federal government engages in would suddenly become hard to pass, once it becomes easy to track who put what riders in the legislation when during the process. A relatively more participatory democracy would likely be relatively less corrupt.

Or so I theorize. Are we ready for the next step in our experiment in self-government? As a jolly side-effect, we’ll probably enjoy some precious Barney Frank tears.

via HotAir headlines

Category: Democrats
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