The Other McCain

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

A Fine Thumbnail 1984

Posted on | November 12, 2015 | 7 Comments

by Smitty

I’m old enough to remember a time that something like this would not have been uncomfortably plausible:

via Gerard

Category: Uncategorized

In The Mailbox: 11.12.15

Posted on | November 12, 2015 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.12.15

— compiled by Wombat-socho


Apologies for the lack of post yesterday; was fully occupied pillaging Las Vegas eateries for Veterans Day.


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Polish Independence Day
Da Tech Guy: Fred Freedom And The Campus Caring Crew – A Fairy Tale From The Near Future
Louder With Crowder: First Amendment, SJW Edition!
The Political Hat: Force Children To Call A Girl A Boy Or GET FIRED
Michelle Malkin: Obamnesty Falls Apart. American Workers Win.
Twitchy: Jonah Goldberg Takes A Guess Why Planned Parenthood Allegedly Overbilled Medicaid


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: WSJ Poll – Trump, Rubio Win Fourth GOP Debate
American Thinker: The Taqiyya Factor
BLACKFIVE: New Website Launches On Veterans Day For Veteran Authors
Conservatives4Palin: Iowa Town Ousts Council Members Who Voted To Remove Veterans Memorial
Don Surber: Expect No Indictment Of Hillary
Jammie Wearing Fools: Mizzou Summed Up – Twitter-Addicted Journalists Looking For Their next Relevancy Hit Off The #BlackLivesMatter Crack Pipe
Joe For America: Black Sheriff – Liberals Whore Themselves Out For The Black Vote
JustOneMinute: Lying Liars Lie
Pamela Geller: EU Flags Burned As 50,000 Join Warsaw Nationalism, Anti-Islamization Demonstration
Shot In The Dark: Another “Common Sense Gun Control Regulation”
STUMP: A Week Of Bad Pension Ideas – Just Make The Full Payments!
The Gateway Pundit: Race Activist Who Got Mizzou President To Resign Does Not Attend School – Lives In Houston
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Your Country Is Finished
The Lonely Conservative: Price Tag For Failed Obamacare Co-Ops? $1.23 Billion
This Ain’t Hell: No, Of Course AARP Isn’t Biased
Weasel Zippers: Justice Department Report – 27 Islamic “Honor Killings” In US Every Year
Megan McArdle: Goldbugs Take Center Stage At Republican Debate
Mark Steyn: Jihad On A Tray


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Category: Linkagery

Amanda Marcotte: College Kids Are ‘Under Assault From Reactionary Forces’

Posted on | November 11, 2015 | 100 Comments

The notorious madcap feminist offers an interesting — and by “interesting,” of course, I mean deranged — defense of the protesting student mob at the University of Missouri:

Young people are under assault from reactionary forces and most of their grievances are not about imagined slights, but about very serious problems they are facing, on and off campus. . . .
[T]he revolt against Wolfe didn’t come out of nowhere. The accusations that Wolfe was indifferent to a handful of racist incidents on campus are only the tip of the iceberg. It appears that, for months now, the campus has been the staging ground for all manner of conservative attacks on the wellbeing of young people not just on campus, but across the state.

Marcotte asserts that “young people — particularly young women and people of color” are being “victimized” by, inter alia, the university’s decision (later reversed) to end health-insurance subsidies for graduate students and the cancellation of the university’s contracts with Planned Parenthood:

The school was listening to and willing to interfere with the health care and educational access the students had, to pander to the whims of a bunch of delusional culture warriors.
While all this is happening, black students on campus are reporting a series of racist incidents. Campus protests were invigorated by the protests against police brutality in nearby Ferguson, but it also appears that all this tumult is invigorating racists, too, who are getting increasingly confrontational and provocative.

Is this true? Are there “racists” at the University of Missouri who are “increasingly confrontational and provocative”? Does Amanda Marcotte, or anyone else, have a list of these racists? Can she name even one of them? And what about this “series of racist incidents” Marcotte describes — has anyone been prosecuted? Are police investigating? Have the federal Department of Education or the Department of Justice raised any concerns about the racist climate on the Columbia, Mo., campus that Marcotte blames on “reactionary forces”? Where is the evidence for Marcotte’s claim that “tumult is invigorating racists” at the University of Missouri? Sean Davis at the Federalist is deeply skeptical:

A reported incident of vandalism at Mizzou sparked university-wide protests, a boycott by the school’s 4-5 football team, and eventually the resignation of the university’s president and chancellor.
There’s only one problem: no evidence of the alleged incident, in which a poop swastika on the wall of a dormitory restroom was reported, has ever been made publicly available. Did this incident occur as reported, or was it an immaculate defecation that formed the foundation of an unimaginable deception?
According to Billy Donley, the president of Mizzou’s Residence Halls Association (RHA), the poop swastika was reported at approximately 2:00 a.m. on October 24, 2015.
“On Saturday, October 24th, at 2:00am an individual came into one of the restrooms in Gateway Hall and drew a swastika on the wall with their own feces,” Donley wrote in a letter several days after the alleged incident. “This event happened while many students, including myself, were already asleep.”
Later in his letter, Donley noted that he only found out about the alleged vandalism incident “via a flyer posted on the walls” of the dorm.

This allegation — smeared feces used to make Nazi graffiti in a dorm bathroom at 2 a.m. — is certainly remarkable and by “remarkable,” of course, I mean, preposterous. Sean Davis was unable to find anyone at the University of Missouri who even claims to have seen this fecal graffiti, and what kind of evidence do we have that it actually happened?

When asked if there was any photographic evidence of the alleged incident, one [university] staffer replied, “Not to my knowledge.” . . .
Multiple activists on Twitter pointed to this photo as proof that the incident occurred as reported, but a Google search for the same image shows that it has been floating around the Internet for nearly a year. A reddit thread from November of 2014 appears to contain the earliest publication of the photo in question, meaning that it most certainly does not constitute proof of the incident alleged to have occurred at Mizzou on October 24, 2015.
Maj. Brian Weimer, the public information officer for the Mizzou police department, told The Federalist that he also did not personally see the poop swastika that was reported to police. When asked if anyone in the police department personally witnessed the swastika, Maj. Weimer clammed up and referred all questions about the incident to the university’s custodian of public records.

This is not a trivial matter. As Sean Davis points out, campus “hate” incidents are frequently revealed to be hoaxes, and if such a hoax helped incite protests that led to the resignation of university officials, taxpayers in Missouri have a right to know why the university police investigation was inadequate. The dubious circumstances surrounding this incident suggest that University of Missouri students may have succumbed to paranoia, believing they are “under assault from reactionary forces” that exist mainly in their own fervid imaginations.

(Via Memeorandum.)





 

Category: Education

Late Night With In The Mailbox: 11.10.15

Posted on | November 11, 2015 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Someone Alert Notorious Robophobe Matt Yglesias!
Da Tech Guy: The Yale Reverse Job Fair
American Irony: If Liberal Intolerance Has Proven Anything, It Might Be This
Politically Incorrect Conservative: Best Quote Of The Week
The Political Hat: Privacy Of The Vote – A Bulwark Protecting Freedom
Michelle Malkin: Let Me Repeat – Hell, No! No Gitmo In Colorado. No Means No!
Twitchy: Read The Chilling E-mail From Missouri’s Campus Police On “Hateful And/Or Hurtful Speech”


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Standardized Tests Are “Modern Day Slavery”
American Thinker: White Racism At Mizzou And Berkeley – Racist Hoaxes Of The Week
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – The British Lion By Tony Schumacher
Conservatives4Palin: #MamaGrizzlyRadio – GOP Candidates Look To Sarah Palin
Don Surber: Prost, Joan Jett
Jammie Wearing Fools: Man At Clinton Event Declares Desire To Strangle Carly Fiorina, Hillary Laughs Hysterically
Joe For America: “Your Children Will Pray To Allah Or Die”
JustOneMinute: A Tale Of Two Headlines
Pamela Geller: Fourteen UK Muslims Accused Of Gang Rape With Thirteen-Year-Old Girl
Protein Wisdom: Mob Rule On Campus
Shot In The Dark: The Peasants Are Restless
STUMP: A Week of Bad Pension Ideas – Splitting The Pension In Order To Save It?
The Gateway Pundit: Mizzou Hunger Striker Claiming He’s Oppressed, Ripping “White Privilege” Comes From Family Worth $20 Million
The Jawa Report: Where’s Howie?
The Lonely Conservative: Updated Welcome Guide For New Immigrants – How To Get Welfare In 14 Languages
This Ain’t Hell: US Marine Corps’ 240th Birthday
Weasel Zippers: Mexican Citizen Arrested For Voter Fraud In Texas
Mark Steyn: Remembrance, Delusion, And Usurpation


Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America’s Best & Brightest Workers

Category: Linkagery

Well, That Didn’t Take Long

Posted on | November 10, 2015 | 61 Comments

A totalitarian professor is in big trouble:

Melissa Click, an assistant professor of mass media at the University of Missouri, ordered a journalist to leave an area where demonstrators had gathered on the Missouri campus.
She then called activists to “muscle” the Asian journalist off campus!
Today the Mizzou journalism faculty voted to revoke the appointment of activist professor Melissa Click.
The Columbia Missourian reported:

Faculty in the Missouri School of Journalism were voting Tuesday to revoke a courtesy appointment for Melissa Click, an assistant professor in MU’s Department of Communication.
The journalism school’s Executive Committee, including Dean David Kurpius, met Tuesday morning to discuss the vote and prepare a statement on Click’s actions Monday as seen in footage of a confrontation between freelance photographer Tim Tai and protesters near the Concerned Student 1950 camp on the Mel Carnahan Quadrangle.
Click was seen at the end of the video asking for assistance and for “muscle” to remove Mark Schierbecker, who filmed the interaction and uploaded his footage to YouTube.

They may need “muscle” to throw her off campus. Any volunteers?

PREVIOUSLY:

 

Category: Education

‘Systemic Racism,’ Anarchy and Incipient Totalitarianism at University of Missouri

Posted on | November 10, 2015 | 133 Comments

The New Regime: Mob rule on the Missouri campus.

A frenzied student mob is now running the University of Missouri, having forced the abdication of university system president Tim Wolfe, while chancellor Bowen Loftin will “transition” to another job, the university board announced:

Today the board announced a series of initiatives to be implemented over the next 90 days to address the racial climate on its campuses, including:

  • A first-ever Chief Diversity, Inclusion and Equity Officer will be appointed for the UM System. Accountability and metrics will be established for the position going forward;
  • A full review will be initiated of all UM System policies as they relate to staff and student conduct;
  • Additional support will be provided for students, faculty and staff who have experienced discrimination and disparate treatment.
  • Additional support will be provided for the hiring and retention of diverse faculty and staff;

Complete capitulation to the mob, basically. Robert Tracisnki at the Federalist tries to explain what happened at Missouri:

A helpful timeline of the case indicates that it started with two cases in which black students at Mizzou said they had racial epithets shouted at them, and one in which a swastika was scrawled on the wall of a bathroom in a university building. In all three of these cases, nobody knows who did it or why. But they were taken as proof of “systemic racism” at the university, and protesters howled for Wolfe’s resignation. Throughout the case, Wolfe issued condemnations of racism, acknowledgements of the justice of the protester’s cause, and apologies for not seeming to take them seriously enough — which, as we should know by now, are all the signs that he’s doomed and will eventually be forced to resign.
Wolfe was targeted, as one protest group put it, because he was “‘not completely’ aware of systemic racism, sexism, and patriarchy on campus.” I love the “not completely.” It reminds me of the old rule about totalitarian revolutions: first, you go after the counter-revolutionaries, then you go after the insufficiently enthusiastic. So Wolfe had to be removed for failing to show immediate and total compliance toward their political agenda.

You can read the whole thing. Tracinski’s point about the futility of Wolfe’s pandering — the apologetic, defensive stance signaling weakness, a prelude to surrender — tells us what to expect as a result of the board’s newfound commitment to “diversity” and “inclusion.” Henceforth, no heterosexual white males will be hired by the University of Missouri, and whenever any student complains of having “experienced discrimination and disparate treatment,” a scapegoat will be fired immediately to appease the Gods of Social Justice. A thorough purge of the faculty and administration is to be expected, and woe be unto anyone on campus who complains about this scorched-earth campaign of bloodthirsty vengeance to eliminate “systemic racism.”

Jim Hoft notes that one of the mob leaders spent five months as an intern to Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. These young totalitarians represent the Progressive Future. The ranting campus mobs are expressing the zeitgeist of a dawning New Age of Intolerance that will suppress dissent and abrogate liberty in the name of Equality. Forcing the authorities into humiliating gestures of abject submission, these impudent student radicals have now imbibed the intoxicating spirit of Total Power and are likely to become lifelong addicts.

Commissars of the New Regime move to squelch any critical scrutiny:

After desperately trying to gin up media coverage of student protests at the University of Missouri, one of the school’s media professors is now furiously trying to “muscle” the press off campus to prevent them from covering student protests that rapidly spiraled out of control Monday. . . .
On Monday afternoon, activists who had demanded Wolfe’s resignation abruptly demanded that media stop covering their activities on the public campus of the taxpayer-funded university. At the center of those demands was Melissa Click, an assistant professor of mass media within Mizzou’s communications department. . . .
“You need to get out, you need to get out,” Melissa Click demanded of the person filming the protest. “You need to get out,” she continued before trying to grab the camera out of the videographer’s hands.
“I actually don’t,” the journalist told Click.
“Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here,” the media professor then hysterically exclaimed to the assembled mob. “I need some muscle over here!”


What sort of scholarship does Professor Click pursue?

Her research interests center on popular culture texts and audiences, particularly texts and audiences disdained in mainstream culture. Her work in this area is guided by audience studies, theories of gender and sexuality, and media literacy. Current research projects involve 50 Shades of Grey readers, the impact of social media in fans’ relationship with Lady Gaga, masculinity and male fans, messages about class and food in reality television programming, and messages about work in children’s television programs.

She got her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a dissertation about the “commodification of femininity, affluence and whiteness in the Martha Stewart phenomenon.” A quote from pp. 57-58 of her dissertation:

Feminist scholarship, which investigates the social construction of gender and the ways in which power infiltrates the most intimate aspects of people’s lives, grew out of a critique of the foundations of “traditional” research. Reinharz (1992) traces the development of feminist scholarship in “Principles of Feminist Research” to the early 1970s when academia began feeling the effects of the social upheaval of the 1960s outside the Academy, and the critique of positivism in the social sciences inside the Academy. The feminist scholarship that emerged from the early 1970s was founded on a critique of the ways in which scientific discourses, far from being neutral and objective as regularly claimed, were biased, androcentric, ethnocentric and heterosexist and distorted the experiences of those under study. Feminist scholars argued that scientific research produced partial knowledge that worked as violence against non-dominant groups excluding them and silencing their voices. In this sense, feminist scholarship offered a revision, a transformation of academic knowledge that would encourage new ways of thinking about the processes and goals of theory and research.

Professor Click is engaged in “a transformation of academic knowledge” to end the “violence against non-dominant groups” perpetrated by traditional methods of research, which are “androcentric, ethnocentric and heterosexist” and thus invalid.

Taxpayers subsidize the universities where young people are indoctrinated by scholars like Professor Click. Do you need any further explanation for why lunatics are running the academic asylum and why dissent against the New Regime will soon be strictly prohibited?

UPDATE: It appears that assistant professor Melissa Click did not have tenure at the university, and the journalism faculty has voted to revoke her appointment. Good.





 

Category: Education

In The Mailbox: 11.09.15

Posted on | November 9, 2015 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.09.15

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Where’s My Safe Space?
Da Tech Guy: Palestinians Claim Temple Mount Cam Is A Trap To Show Them Doing Nothing Wrong
American Irony: Time To Start Calling The Media What It Really Is
Conservative Review: The Knife Intifada – Coming To A City Near You
The Political Hat: The Climate Inquisition
Michelle Malkin: Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America’s Best & Brightest Workers
Twitchy: This Is A Stupid Statement, Even For Joe Biden


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Black Activists Turn On Shaun King For Collapse of “Justice Together” Org, Financial Irregularities
American Thinker: Warren Buffett And The Keystone Decision
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – Blood Red By Wendy Staub
Conservatives4Palin: Hillary Shrugs Off The Deaths Of 300,000 Veterans
Don Surber: Does Jim Justice Already Own West Virginia?
Jammie Wearing Fools: Nine False Things Obama Said About His Biography That Didn’t Cause A Media Feeding Frenzy
Joe For America: Thugs With Knives And Hammers Terrorize British Streets
JustOneMinute: End It, Don’t Mend It
Pamela Geller: Thousands March Demanding Merkel’s Resignation
Protein Wisdom: Starbucks – Tempest In A Coffee Cup, Or Just Another PC Paper Cut Against Tradition?
Shot In The Dark: Heather Martens – “Round Up The Usual Suspects!”
STUMP: A Week Of Bad Pension Ideas – First Up, Guaranteeing Returns
The Gateway Pundit: UC Stabber Faisal Muhammad Was On Terror Watch List – College Was Warned
The Lonely Conservative: Carson Tells Media “Thanks For Helping Me Rake In $3.5 Million”
This Ain’t Hell: Captain Andrew Gremillion, Louisiana NG, Saving the World
Weasel Zippers: British Catholic Schools Eliminate Islam From Religious Studies Courses, Muslim Leaders Outraged
Megan McArdle: A Birth Control Morality Play Comes To The Supreme Court
Mark Steyn: We Were Soldiers


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Category: Linkagery

OK, If #BlackLivesMatter Affects SEC Football, We Have a Serious Problem

Posted on | November 9, 2015 | 108 Comments

University of Missouri football players are threatening a boycott until university president Tim Wolfe resigns, but considering the way they’ve been playing this season (4-5 overall, 1-5 in the Southeastern Conference), it’s not as if this will have any impact on the SEC title picture. Alabama beat LSU Saturday, so Derrick Henry and the Crimson Tide defense are far more important, from a purely athletic perspective, than the racial acrimony roiling the Missouri campus.

Exactly what is happening at Missouri? Well, of course, the proximity to Ferguson — scene of the Michael Brown shooting that sparked what has become the #BlackLivesMatter protest movement — could be seen as a relevant factor. However, the real trouble campus has been agitated by a graduate student named Jonathan Butler:

Butler . . . wants to force Wolfe’s resignation because of a handful of recent incidents which have occurred on the Columbia, Mo. campus.
In a letter to school officials posted on his Facebook page, Butler indicated that he began his hunger strike because someone in a pickup truck allegedly shouted a racist insult at a black student government member, because state law prevents Planned Parenthood from performing on-campus abortions and because someone drew a swastika with human feces in a dormitory bathroom.
Some observers have suggested that the bathroom swastika may be a hoax. Why, law professor blogger Ann Althouse has asked, for example, would any dedicated racial supremacist create a swastika out of human feces?
Butler admits in the letter that none of the incidents he cites are Wolfe’s fault. Nevertheless, Butler has concluded, “as a collection of incidents at the university, they are his responsibility to address.”
This summer, prior to Butler’s decision to go on a hunger strike because of racism allegations, the graduate student’s substantially different agenda focused on a change in University of Missouri policy which ended subsidized health insurance for graduate students. . . .
School officials have said the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — forced them to stop subsidizing grad student health insurance.


So, basically, this is Obama’s fault. It figures. Meanwhile, in Tuscaloosa, the Crimson Tide refuses to be distracted. Arkansas upset Ole Miss on Saturday, thus making it possible for Alabama to hope for a shot at the SEC title, but Tide linebacker Reggie Ragland was so focused on beating LSU that he didn’t even know about the Arkansas game until a reporter told him after ‘Bama had beat the Tigers 30-16:

“So we hold our own destiny,” Ragland said, laughing. Then he turned stone-faced again. “That still really don’t mean nothing. We’ve got to keep playing ball,” he said. “We’ve still got two games left in the West to finish off. We’ve still got to do our job. We’ve got a great opponent in Dak Prescott and [Mississippi State] next week.”

Damn right. You hold your own destiny. One game at a time.




 

Category: Football, Racism
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