The Other McCain

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

In The Mailbox: 10.06.15

Posted on | October 6, 2015 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Da Tech Guy: Unexpectedly – Strange Framing On Israel, Oregon
The Camp of the Saints: #OUTLAW Activity – People In Roseburg Rebel
American Irony: How To Get Democrats To Agree Gun Ownership Is A Right
First Street Journal: Affirmative Action And Voting Patterns Of Asian-Americans, Jews
Political Hat: Feminism – A Totalitarian Movement To Destroy Civilization As We Know It
Conservative Intel: Watch Your Back, Joe Biden
Michelle Malkin: The Baby Butchers And Their Media Butchers
Doug Powers: Live From New York, It’s A Six-Minute Campaign Ad For Hillary!
Twitchy: Twitter Launches Human-Aggregated “Moments” Feature
Shark Tank: Rebecca Negron Struggles With Tax Reform Question


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Obama Not Welcome In Roseburg, Says Local Paper’s Publisher
American Thinker: “Gun Control” Is Actually Conservative Control
BLACKFIVE: Book Review And Interview – Why The World Needs A Powerful America
Conservatives4Palin: Queen Hillary – It’s Beyond The Pale For You Peasants To Question My Corruption
Don Surber: Speaking Of “Disaster” And “Catastrophe”, Charleston Gazette…
Jammie Wearing Fools: Republicans Accuse NY Gov Cuomo Of Using Oregon Tragedy To Promote His Agenda
Joe For America: Want To Know How Russia Handles Terrorists?
JustOneMinute: Gun Violence And Violence To Statistics
Pamela Geller: Swedish Bishop Calls For Church To Remove Crosses, Install Muslim Prayer Space
Protein Wisdom: Chick-Fil-A Opens In NYC, Liberal Heads Explode
Shot In The Dark: Watch Mitch Berg DESTROY This Liberal Hamster’s Argument With This One Weird Trick
STUMP: Illinois Finance – The Ongoing Non-Crisis And The Oncoming Real Crisis
The Gateway Pundit: Thousands Of PEGIDA Supporters Rally In Dresden Against Migrant Invasion
The Jawa Report: Russian War Porn – Raqqa
The Lonely Conservative: Middle Class Americans Worse Off Thanks To Obamacare
This Ain’t Hell: Anti-Gun Nuts
Weasel Zippers: Obama Administration Deports Record Low Number Of Convicted Criminal Illegals
Megan McArdle: Gig Economy is Piecework, But This Isn’t Dickens
Mark Steyn: The Two Faces Of Facebook


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Category: Linkagery

When Excellence Is Expected

Posted on | October 6, 2015 | 58 Comments

Today is my 56th birthday and I don’t intend to spend it arguing online with a Swedish idiot who popped up on Twitter to declare: “The right has become pro-rape. White boys can’t attract women naturally, have to resort to force to enter the gene pool.” To which I replied:

1. You’re insane.
2. I’m a married father of six. You?

As Vox Day says, “SJWs always project,” and there was an obvious projection (to say nothing of the intended insult) in this ridiculous suggestion that I, or any of my numerous progeny, would “have to resort to force to enter the gene pool.”

A proprietary sense of patriarchal pride in our offspring is the product of a sense that we are custodians of a worthy inheritance. A proper knowledge of our ancestry and a grateful appreciation of our own particular family gives rise to a dutiful concern to care for our children. The other day, discussing with my 12-year-old daughter Reagan her career ambitions, I made the point that, among my various accomplishments, I consider fatherhood foremost. After all, I explained, a “career” is simply what we do to pay the bills; the real substance of life, the purpose of all our labor, is to provide for our family. It is easy to lose sight of this reality when we are young and dreaming infinite dreams, but it is also easy to forget this as grown-ups immersed in the day-to-day pursuit of success or, more practically, just trying to pay the bills.

“To live for the moment is the prevailing passion — to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future. . . .
“Narcissism emerges as the typical form of character structure in a society that has lost interest in the future.”
— Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979)

My own father worked 37 years at the Lockheed plant in Marietta, Georgia, which was the way he paid for his own American Dream — a home of his own where he raised three sons in respectable middle-class circumstances. Having grown up on a farm in Alabama during the Great Depression, my father always told his sons we didn’t know how good we had it and of course he was right. Kids who grew up in middle-class America during the post-WWII boom had little sense of their lives as the product of decades of hard work by their parents and grandparents. Your Dad got up early and went to his job, your Mom got you off to school and then went to her job, and because everybody around you was living a variation of the same kind of life, it did not occur to you how remarkably good your life was, nor did you have any real appreciation of the hard work and sacrifice necessary to provide you with this life.

The Ordinary American — the guy who goes to work every day to pay the bills for his family — is too little appreciated in an era when the media promotes the idea that celebrities and politicians are the only important people. CNN today is telling me the latest about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, while the people suffering from floods in South Carolina are just nameless victims. Meanwhile, somewhere in Sweden, a leftist feels an overwhelming urge to lecture me on Twitter about “white boys” who “can’t attract women naturally.”

Not my problem.

Nor is this a problem for my four sons. The McCain “gene pool” is doing just fine, thank you very much, but what about this guy in Sweden? Has he attracted any women, “naturally” or otherwise? Does he have any sons or daughters yet? If not, why not? “SJWs always project,” and his arrogant presumption about the problems of others is most likely an externalized representation of the knowledge of his own dim prospects for reproductive success. “The personal is political,” you see, but the Left’s ideological agenda — a grandiose rationalization of their own narrow personal grievances against “society” — is presented to us by the media as if we should care as much about other people’s problems as we care about our own problems. Somewhere there’s a “transgender” weirdo whose feelings are hurt, and we’re all supposed to stop whatever it is we’re doing to exude emotional sympathy for this social injustice.

Not my problem.

If your kid grows up to be a transgender weirdo, that’s your problem, and I refuse to let you make it my problem. You never asked me for any child-rearing advice, and I doubt you would have listened if I volunteered my advice, so your weirdo kid will just have to deal with whatever problems he, she or it has as an adult weirdo.

This morning, my wife and I were talking about how excellent our children are. Our oldest three (a daughter now 26 and twin sons, now 23) gave us relatively few problems as teenagers and are now responsible, successful adults, and the younger three (boys 16 and 14, and a girl, 12) are all behaving themselves quite well.

“Don’t be a weirdo” — I actually say that to my kids from time to time, usually after encountering some bizarre madness on feminist Tumblr, where bizarre madness proliferates. My research into radical feminism has produced an odd disconnect between (a) the strange people with strange ideas I confront in my research, and (b) the sane, normal reality of the actual human beings around me. My teenagers have become accustomed to me occasionally wandering into their room to issue warnings about Things Not to Do, i.e., “Don’t be a psycho killer.”

Ian Mercer apparently never gave his weirdo son that advice:

The father of the Roseburg, Oregon, shooter said he doesn’t know where his son got his weapons, and he declined to comment much on his son’s mental state, but he was quick to say what he thought was to blame in the deadly college attack: Guns.
Ian Mercer, during an interview outside his California home Saturday, told CNN that he didn’t know his son had a single gun, let alone 13. He asked, “How on earth could he compile 13 guns? How could that happen?”
Mercer’s son, Chris Harper-Mercer, staged an attack at Umpqua Community College, killing nine people and injuring nine others Thursday. . . .
Other countries don’t see mass shootings at the same clip that the United States does, he said, asserting, “Somebody has to ask the question: How is it so easy to get all these guns?”
His condemnation of guns grew stronger as the interview went on, and he closed his remarks on the subject with a call for change.
“It has to change. How can it not? Even people that believe in the right to bear arms, what right do you have to take people’s lives? That’s what guns are, the killers. Simple as that. Simple as that. It’s black and white. What do you want a gun for?”

Way to avoid personal responsibility, Psycho Killer Dad. Hey, divorce your wife, re-marry and don’t worry about that kid from your first marriage, because what could possibly go wrong?

The gunman who executed nine people at an Oregon community college before killing himself ranted in a manifesto he left behind about not having a girlfriend and thinking everyone else was “crazy,” a law enforcement official said Monday.
The official also said the mother of 26-year-old gunman Christopher Harper-Mercer has told investigators he was struggling with some mental health issues. . . .
Harper-Mercer complained in the manifesto about not having a girlfriend, and he seemed to feel like he was very rational while others around him were not, the official said.
He wrote something to the effect of: “Other people think I’m crazy, but I’m not. I’m the sane one,” the official said. The manifesto was a couple of pages long.

I’ll add Never Write a “Manifesto” to my kids’ list of Things Not to Do.

In a world gone mad, being happy and successful requires a process of subtraction, a list of dangerous craziness to avoid. This is why I find myself telling my kids things like, “Don’t become a heroin addict.” As obvious as that advice may seem, apparently a lot of kids never heard it, because OD’ing on heroin is now the leading cause of accidental death in Ohio, surpassing traffic fatalities. So here’s your fatherly advice, kids: “Always wear your seatbelt, don’t text while driving, be careful when driving at night or in the rain and, by the way, heroin is a bad drug. Also, never go on mass-murder rampage and don’t be a transgender weirdo.”

Young people can think of life as a list of potential outcomes and simply by subtracting the obviously bad stuff –psycho killer, heroin addict, “Caitlyn” Jenner — manage to live a decent and respectable life. You may never win any awards, become famous or make a million dollars, but at least you didn’t OD on heroin, murder nine people or embarrass the family by marrying a Kardashian and appearing on a magazine cover as a 65-year-old transvestite. (Of course, Never Marry a Kardashian is on my kids’ list of Things Not to Do.) People nowadays become wealthy celebrities for doing stuff that, once upon a time, would have gotten them locked up in a lunatic asylum, and yet people are surprised when a weirdo who can’t even get a girlfriend decides to become famous by shooting up a community college. This kind of Loser-Goes-Out-in-a-Blaze-of-Glory scenario keeps happening, and the media tell us to blame guns, because obviously we can’t blame the media.

Well, that was all a long digression, another self-indulgent detour down a sidetrack, but hey, it’s my birthday. Indulge me.

See, this Swedish SJW on Twitter thinks that I am ignorant, and in need of his enlightenment, so he’s got to lecture me about social problems that I’m obviously too stupid to understand, despite the fact that (a) I’m an award-winning journalist and author, and (b) he’s just an SJW troll with a Twitter account. Oh, and I almost forgot to add (c) I’ve raised six kids, none of whom have become heroin addicts or psycho killers.

Also, none of my kids have married a Kardashian — yet.

So far, so good, and we hope to keep it that way.

The Swedish troll expanded on his theory — “White boys . . . have to resort to force to enter the gene pool” — by adding: “I was talking about the new generation of men, where many can’t compete when women are financially independent.”

Oh, what a bundle of presumption he packs into that single tweet, beginning with the presumption of my ignorance. Here I am with Lionel Tiger’s book The Decline of Males on my desk, as also Helen Smith’s book Men on Strike and yet, the troll evidently presumes, I know nothing about the various social and economic forces influencing demographics in the 21st century. Let’s start with this: Do trends make people or do people make trends?” The modern conception of History with a capital-H, a transcendent force beyond human control that renders the ordinary individual a helpless victim of an impersonal trend, must be recognized as a philosophical error if we are not to sink into despair.

“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
— George Orwell, 1945

Does the Swedish troll suppose my life is a random accident? Am I not able to make conscious decisions? Can I not examine the current trend (whatever it might be), and plot my own course within the available alternatives? My parents didn’t raise me to believe I was helpless, and certainly I would never want my children to believe their lives are a random accident. Our lives have meaning and purpose. The choices we make — our actions as individuals — have consequences for our own lives and for the lives of others. Having lived quite carelessly in my youth, I consider my rather miraculous survival must have served a purpose, if only to equip me to warn young people against careless living.

With this in mind, then, what about “the new generation of men, where many can’t compete when women are financially independent”? Let us ask, with whom do these men compete? Or, we may ask, how is it that “women are financially independent,” yet “the new generation of men” are non-competitive? Exactly who are these white boys who “can’t attract women naturally”? Aren’t these decadent weaklings the products of a degenerate secularized culture that tells them their lives have no meaning or purpose, because History with a capital-H is an omnipotent force independent of their own choices and actions? Isn’t it the case that “the new generation of men” have been taught that there is no God, and have instead been taught a materialistic worldview void of moral purpse or spiritual meaning? And is it not an ironic consequence of these atheistic ideas — not just History with a capital-H, but also Progress with a capital-P and Science with a capital-S — is that the allegedly enlightened people who embraced Darwinian evolution as Truth with a capital-T are locked into a downward spiral of demographic decline? They claim to be superior, yet are evidently unfit for the survival of the fittest.

The Swedish troll continued his Twitter lecture: “Now that women can have education and careers, it appears there is an excess of men,” and “Now that men no longer have exclusive access to the working world, a lot of young men no longer have appeal.”

To which I repeat: Not my problem.

If it is true that “there is an excess of men,” or that “a lot of young men no longer have appeal,” this is a problem for the failures, the scrubs, the guys who can’t compete — and also, in similar measure, for the women who don’t measure up to the standards necessary to attract a winner. Lecture me all you want about “financially independent women,” Mister Swedish Troll, but I have two eyes and a brain, and I know how miserable and lonely a lot of those women actually are. Despite all their talk about “empowerment,” many such women are psychological cripples who rely on antidepressant medications just to make it through the day. All this Progress with a capital-P and Equality with a capital-E has not been achieved without a price, and it is lonely women who are paying that price — liberated to become a Crazy Cat Lady!

Stay away from crazy women, I tell my sons. If a woman starts babbling lunatic gibberish about the patriarchy and misogyny and oppression, this is your cue to walk away, boys. “Hunt where the ducks are,” as the old saying goes, and it’s foolish to waste your time talking to angry neurotic women, when there are so many happy normal women who enjoy a bit of the old patriarchal oppression, IYKWIMAITYD.

Winners find a way to win, whatever the challenges may be.

Enduring hardship, overcoming obstacles, the survivor survives, and every day of survival is a victory unto itself. Today I have survived 56 years, and have already lived to see two grandsons born. My children are miracles, not accidents, and today when my daughter Reagan was leaving for school I told her, “Be excellent all day long.”

Don’t just be good. Be excellent. Excellence is expected.

Today is a very happy birthday. Hit the freaking tip jar.





 

Category: Family

Harvard Feminists Lie About Rape

Posted on | October 5, 2015 | 108 Comments

An anti-rape protest at Harvard University.

No honest, decent or moral young person would ever want to go near Harvard University, a corrupt and decadent institution run by depraved perverts. Harvard women are particularly notorious for their shameless promiscuity — one Harvard girl boasted of her “freedom to have as many sexual partners as I want without being looked down on” — which is a major cause of sexually transmitted diseases in the Boston metro area.

“Boston residents ages 15 through 24 are almost four times
more likely to have Chlamydia than residents overall.
Among that age group, 70% of those diagnosed are female.”

Sex with Harvard girls is such a health risk it’s a wonder any man smart enough to get into Harvard would do it. Of course, most men who attend Harvard are gay, which may substantially lower their risk of chlamydia. However, some Harvard women still claim to be victims of rape:

The number of rapes reported by students at Harvard University’s Cambridge campus “nearly doubled” between 2013 & 2014, according to an article in school paper The Harvard Crimson. This alarming info comes via the new campus-security report from Harvard police, compiled as part of federal Clery Act requirements. But like so much related to campus rape numbers, this seemingly drastic increase isn’t nearly as alarming as some will make it out to be.
First, it’s important to consider concrete sexual assault numbers, which were still quite low. In 2014,33 instances of rape were reported to either campus police, university officials, or local law enforcement by students at Harvard’s main campus in Cambridge, and one rape was reported at Harvard’s Longwood campus. . . .. The number of rapes reported at Harvard last year is up from 17 incidents in 2013, and 24 in 2012.
But as Ashe Schow points out in the Washington Examiner, six of the 2014 rape reports — nearly 20 percent — were determined to be “unfounded,” i.e. “false or baseless.” This leaves us with just 28 credible rape reports at Harvard last year. . . .
In any event, with a population of about 21,000 students, Harvard University’s rape rate for 2014 was about 0.13 percent, or one in every 750 Harvard students.
The campus-crime report does not include a gender breakdown for rape victims, but let’s just assume for the sake of further extrapolation that all 28 were women. Roughly half the Harvard University student body is women. If we count both graduate and undergraduate students, that’s a rape rate of about 0.27 percent for female Harvard students, or one in every 375 Harvard women.
There are about 6,400 undergraduate students at Harvard, and about half are women as well. If we assume all the reported rape victims were undergraduate women — a not baseless assumption, considering only one incident of rape reported between 2012-2014 took place outside of a residence hall (though of course these aren’t exclusively undergrad housing) — that leaves us with a rape rate of about 0.88 percent.
In other words, this worst-case-scenario assumption means that about one in 114 female undergraduates reported rapes at Harvard last year.

You can read the whole thing. The fact that there were six false rape accusations — officially determined to be “unfounded . . . baseless” — at Harvard last year does not surprise anyone who knows anything about Harvard girls, whose dishonesty is as notorious as their promiscuity.

Still we must confront the shocking allegation that Harvard is now admitting heterosexual men who are willing to have sex with Harvard women despite the well-known risk of chlamydia infection.

This suggests either a serious mental health crisis in Cambridge, or else these Harvard students are using powerful mind-altering narcotics that deprive them of their capacity for rational thought. Perhaps they are getting high on ether. As a famous journalist once observed, “There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge.”

Whatever the explanation, any man accused of having sex with a Harvard woman should plead insanity, because he would have to be completely unhinged to do something as crazy as that.

P.S.: Tuesday will be my 56th birthday. Hit the freaking tip jar.





 

Category: Sex Trouble

Anti-Asian Discrimination: The Hidden Secret of Elite Educational ‘Diversity’

Posted on | October 5, 2015 | 43 Comments

The Economist reports:

Michael Wang, a young Californian, came second in his class of 1,002 students; his ACT score was 36, the maximum possible; he sang at Barack Obama’s inauguration; he got third place in a national piano contest; he was in the top 150 of a national maths competition; he was in several national debating-competition finals. But when it came to his university application he faced a serious disappointment for the first time in his glittering career. He was rejected by six of the seven Ivy League colleges to which he applied. . . .
In May this year Mr Wang joined a group of 64 Asian-American organisations that made a joint complaint to the Department of Education against Harvard, alleging racial discrimination. That follows a lawsuit filed last year against Harvard and the University of North Carolina by a group of Asian-American students making similar charges. The department rejected the claim in July, but another two complaints have since been filed by Asian-Americans, one against Harvard and one against nine other universities. . . .
It is their educational outperformance that is most remarkable: 49% of Asian-Americans have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 28% of the general population. Whereas Asian-Americans make up 5.6% of the population of the United States, according to the complaint to the Department of Education they make up more than 30% of the recent American maths and physics Olympiad teams and Presidential Scholars, and 25-30% of National Merit Scholarships. Among those offered admission in 2013 to New York’s most selective public high schools, Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science, 75% and 60% respectively were Asian. The Asian population of New York City is 13%. . . .

Read the whole thing. Creating what liberals consider “diversity” on top-tier university campuses — including leading state universities like the University of North Carolina and the University of Virginia — requires not only blatant favoritism toward black and Hispanic students, but also discrimination against groups like Asian-Americans and Jews whose superior academic achievement means there are “too many” of them at the most prestigious schools. If standardized test scores and GPA were the basis admission, there would be far more Chinese and Jewish kids at Harvard and MIT, but this would not fit liberals’ notion of “diversity.” There are many harmful consequence of the unofficial quotas at these schools, not the least of which is the resentments created among bright young people (and their parents) who realize how the playing field is being deliberately tilted in the name of “social justice.”

The academic elite is profoundly and irreparably corrupt, and this corruption has tainted the entire educational system:

The whole purpose of our education system is to indoctrinate young people with the “progressive” attitudes approved by the intellectual elite. . . .  The hiring process in academia is controlled by people who would much rather hire nudist sex maniacs than accidentally permit a Republican or a Christian to sneak onto the faculty.
Our universities today are more fanatically dedicated to the abolition of Christianity than was the Emperor Nero . . .
If your kid isn’t an atheist homosexual by the time he gets his high school diploma, the public education system has failed to achieve its intended objectives. Certainly, no elite university would be interested in normal kids. The folks who run Harvard don’t want Christian heterosexuals on campus any more than they want Republicans on the faculty. If you are raising your kids to be decent, honest and moral, you wouldn’t want them applying to an Ivy League school anyway. The elite campuses — Columbia, Penn, Brown, Princeton, etc. — now only accept the most indecent, dishonest and immoral young people.

Parents of students like Michael Wang really ought to thank God their kids didn’t get into a school like Harvard or Yale, where “progressive” decadence is the worst and all the students are indecent, dishonest and immoral, their souls forever corrupted by their association with these institutions of wickedness and injustice. Elite campuses are a latter-day Doctor Frankenstein’s lab, where the intellectual perverts on the faculty work like mad scientists, turning bright young people into monsters and Democrats (but I repeat myself).

(Hat-tip:  Antisocial Justice on Twitter.)





 

Category: Education, Racism

Rule 5 Sunday: Time For The Professionals

Posted on | October 4, 2015 | 11 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Week 4 of the NFL season is underway, and this being Vegas, my “home” casino has a (free) game going on that gives away stuff based on how successful one is at picking winners in each week of the season. Me, I don’t follow the NFL, so after a futile first couple of weeks, I’ve delegated my picks to Cortana and am finally reaping some rewards. That having been said, my main interest in the NFL lies in their cheerleaders, and this week the Dolphins are providing the appetizer.

Dolphins cheerleaders kickin’ it at Wembley.

Goodstuff leads off this week with Buck Rogers’ dilemma: Colonel Wilma Deering or Princess Ardala? Ninety Miles from Tyranny follows up with Morning Mistress, Hot Pick of the Late Night, and Girls with Guns; we also heard from Animal Magnetism with Rule 5 Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, to say nothing of First Street Journal and The Big Red One. (No, not a Christina Hendricks reference.)

EBL’s herd of heifers (and stranger creatures) this week includes the Sun Prairie Sweet Corn Festival, Nadia Menaz, Chita Rivera, Robot Pinups for a Robophobe, Fast Times at Barack Obama High, Emayatzy Corinealdi, and The Martian.

At Soylent Siberia, it’s your weekly coffee creamer, a Monday Motivationer with a beauty mark, Tuesday Titillation Gravity Well, Humpday Hawtness Comstock Load, Falconsword Fursday El Fuego, Corset Friday: Body Paint and Oktoberfestivities, and Weekender Come Hither.

A View from the Beach chips in with Tricia Helfer – The Cylon Wins, MMA Fighter Wants “Boob Discount”, Thursday Morning Wake Up, Gone Fishing, “Fire”, Water on Mars!, What Does a 100 lb Catfish Eat?, More Gratuitous Kate Upton and When The Truth is Found To Be Lies.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Sanaa Lathan, his Vintage Babe is Linda Darnell, Sex in Advertising is covered by Alexander Wang (“X marks the spot!”), and of course, there’s the obligatory 49ers cheerleader. At Dustbury, it’s Debelah Morgan and Yuri Ebehara.

Thanks to everyone for their links! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for next Sunday’s Rule 5 Roundup is midnight on Saturday, October 10.


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Category: Rule 5

The #AmberRoseSlutWalk: Feminism as Public Celebration of Inchoate Rage

Posted on | October 4, 2015 | 52 Comments

 

Before attempting to describe Saturday’s event in Los Angeles — a tawdry carnival of celebrity-driven feminist lunacy — I must first remind you how, when and where the “Slut Walk” movement began.

In January 2011, a Toronto police official, Constable Michael Sanguinetti, gave a presentation on the topic of crime prevention at York University, during the course of which he said that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.” This incited a huge controversy and, although official apologies were issued, Canadian feminists refused to be placated or appeased. Among these implacable women was Heather Jarvis, a self-described “queer feminist activist,” who was then 25 and attending Guelph University. In an interview, she explained the idea behind the first Slut Walk:

Jarvis says an apology is simply not enough.
“We are still skewed toward victim-blaming,” she explained. “Most sexual assaults don’t happen to a woman in a short skirt by a stranger in an alleyway. We need (Toronto Police) to modify their education and training.”
After Jarvis connected online with York graduate student Sonya Barnett, they enlisted the help of three other women — Alyssa Teekah, Jeanette Janzen and Erika Jane Scholz — to organize the walk. The controversially named protest came from an “instinctual place,” Jarvis says, and should not deter women, or men, from supporting their cause.
“Reclaiming language is not new,” Jarvis said. “It can be very powerful. (Slut) is a word that is used day in and day out to damage us. Let’s use it to empower us.” . . .
“We need to say that blaming victims of sexual assault is not OK.”

Thus, the concept of women marching in deliberately provocative clothing and embracing the word “slut” had a specific origin, but was aimed generally at promoting certain feminist ideas — criticism of women’s sexual behavior is never permissible, and it is “blaming victims of sexual assault” to expect women to take reasonable precautions for their own safety. Feminists say it is misogyny to suggest that women “dressing like sluts” are at greater risk of rape. The first Slut Walk, in April 2011, was intended to make the point that women ought to be able to parade half-naked in the streets without fear.

That first march spawned imitations in many other cities — I covered the 2013 Slut Walk in Washington, D.C. — but this movement’s meaning and purpose has really never been very coherent. Constable Sanguinetti apologized immediately for his remark, and the protesters in Toronto weren’t saying anything that feminists hadn’t said before, going back to the “Take Back the Night” rallies of the late 1970s and ’80s.

What the “Slut Walk” movement has made obvious, really, are the inherent contradictions of liberal “pro sex” feminism, which celebrates irresponsible promiscuity as the measure of women’s “empowerment,” even while condemning men who react to such wanton behavior by regarding women as “sex objects.” Liberal feminists act as if men alone are to blame for the putrid decadence of contemporary sexual culture. Women can do whatever they want and never be held responsible for the consequences, whereas any man who says a word of criticism or disapproval is denounced by feminists as a hateful monster.

Thus we come to Saturday’s “Slut Walk” event in Los Angeles, which was organized by a hiphop celebrity named Amber Rose, whose B-list biography can be summarized in fewer than 140 characters:

Abby Sewell of the Los Angeles Times describes Saturday’s carnival:

In a scene that was half-red carpet paparazzi circus, half-political protest, several hundred people joined stripper turned model Amber Rose at Pershing Square on Saturday afternoon for an event dubbed SlutWalk.
The event was promoted as a way to express “outrage toward issues of sexual violence, gender inequality, derogatory labeling and victim blaming.” . . .
The mostly female crowd, some shirtless, others in costume and in various states of dress, carried signs declaring “My Clothes Are Not My Consent” and “The Way I Dress Does Not Mean Yes.”
Rose, bearing a sign that read “Strippers Have Feelings Too,” led the group on a brief march up and down Olive Street as curious tourists and shoppers, and a few hecklers, watched. . . .
Some of the attendees said they were drawn by the star power of Rose, who first came into the limelight in 2008 when she was dating rapper Kanye West.
Courtney Scott, 22, attended with her mother and sister from Los Alamitos after learning about the event on Rose’s Instagram. She said she wanted to spread the message against “slut shaming,” but also was excited to catch a glimpse of Rose.
“She’s really comfortable in who she is,” Scott said. “She’s not ashamed of her past.”
There were some parts of Rose’s past that she evidently wanted to avoid discussing Saturday, however.
A document distributed to media covering the event listed “approved topics” of coverage, including “Amber Rose Slut Walk LA,” “feminist platform,” “other projects/business ventures Amber is working on,” and “Amber’s fashion.”
It added the injunction: “No Questions regarding Kanye West or Kim Kardashian.”

A minor celebrity, whose chief claim to fame is that her ex-boyfriend is now involved with a Kardashian. wants the world to know that “Strippers Have Feelings Too.” It’s so . . . profound. Meanwhile, this happened:

Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos was ejected from the Amber Rose Slut Walk in Los Angeles [Saturday] afternoon. Slut Walkers could be heard yelling to police officers, “Thanks for taking out the trash!”?
Yiannopoulos was reporting from the event with a film crew, interviewing Rebel Media broadcaster and Canadian libertarian politician Lauren Southern about the feminist movement which protests against “rape culture” and “slut-shaming.”
Southern had just asked host Amber Rose whether she believed in rape culture. Event organizers immediately announced to Breitbart that they were calling law enforcement to have both journalists escorted from Pershing Square in downtown LA.
Protesters snatched and tore up Yiannopoulos’s placard, which read: “‘Rape Culture And Harry Potter’: Both Fantasy” in view of the police, who stood by while protesters bellowed and grabbed at a second placard that read, “Regret is not Rape.”?

You see asking questions — being skeptical of feminism’s truth-claims — is impermissible in 21st-century America. Are women really victims of “rape culture”? Is promiscuity actually “empowering” for women? You aren’t even allowed to ask these questions, and certainly you can’t expect feminists to provide coherent answers.

Feminism is never a dialogue. It is a lecture, a diatribe, a one-sided totalitarian propaganda of hatred, demonizing males as scapegoats who are always to blame for anything and everything.





 

Category: Sex Trouble

The Intersectional Oppression Derby

Posted on | October 4, 2015 | 65 Comments

Feminist Tumblr is home to strange people:

I’m a white, queer, (more specifically bi/pan), 20-something genderweird woman-type person (still figuring out what the deal is with my gender). I use she/her pronouns.
This blog talks about relationships through an inclusive feminist lens, as well as joining in discussion on other feminist topics. Not a TERF/SWERF or a libfem.
This blog strives for understanding of intersectionality and awareness of oppressive power structures. If I f–k up and say something problematic or oppressive, you’re welcome to send an ask about it and I will listen and try to do better.

Obviously, we are the oppressive power structure:

On a personal level, being misogynist, ableist, homophobic, etc. is not just about feeling hatred for marginalised groups. Hatred is a symptom, and not everyone has that symptom. Sometimes it’s pity. Or creepy dehumanising fascination. Or indifference. Or ignorance and a self-absorbed refusal to learn to be better.
But it’s not about your feelings at all — it’s about actions and whether your actions support an oppressive system.
That’s why you can’t say, “I’m not misogynist! I love women!” and have people go, “well, you know your feelings best!” It’s not about your feelings. It’s about what you’re doing and if it’s harmful. And you do not get to decide if you’re harming others.

Here’s the thing: Most people are just trying to live their lives, pay their bills, and take care of their families. We don’t have the leisure to worry about the plight of “marginalised groups.” But feminists apparently don’t have bills to pay or families to take care of, so the “oppressive system” is all they ever worry about. Feminists believe that constantly worrying about this stuff makes them superior to the rest of us, who are all “misogynist, ableist, homophobic, etc.” because we have other things to do with our normal lives in the real world.

According to feminism, normal people are the problem, and “queer, genderweird woman-type people” are the solution.





 

Category: Sex Trouble

The Glory Game and Other Oldies But Goodies

Posted on | October 4, 2015 | 16 Comments

— by Wombat-socho


Before we get into the books, I want to thank everyone who ordered stuff through my Amazon links this past month. Not all of my posts get the kind of comment traffic that Stacy’s posts draw (and frankly, I’d be surprised if they did) but when I look at the Amazon Associates report that lists all the stuff you folks have been kind enough to order, it makes me think I’m not just throwing rocks into the big pond of the Internet. People really do appreciate what I’m doing here.


As I mentioned in the last book post, I’m enjoying unpacking my library and finding a bunch of books that I literally haven’t seen in years, and that in many cases are no longer in print. One of these is Keith Laumer’s undeservedly obscure The Glory Game; the second half, “Message to an Alien”, was republished in one of the Laumer anthologies Eric Flint edited for Baen, Legions of Space*, and stands on its own well enough – but it’s not the whole story by a long shot, and the first half, with its political struggles uncomfortably similar to the current day, adds a lot of depth to the character of Commodore Tancredi Dalton. John C. Wright has an excellent essay on the book which I can’t recommend highly enough.


I didn’t actually get to watch much baseball this year, but since I’ve been unpacking my library I have been able to go face-first into some of my favorite baseball books again. One of them, unsurprisingly, is The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. This excellent combination of baseball history, biographical encyclopedia, and irreverent comments on all manner of things baseball-related (and sometimes not) is a real treasure, although it’s more than a little annoying that Simon & Schuster has the Kindle price jacked up to more than the paperback price. If you’re one of those baseball fans who is allergic to sabermetrics (i.e. any statistic not found in your local newspaper’s box scores) there is some of that, but it’s not nearly as obtrusive as it is in, say, Baseball Prospectus 2015.


Ages and ages ago when I first started doing these book posts, I put in a good word for Sandy Mitchell’s Ciaphas Cain: Hero of the Imperium, an unusually amusing homage to George MacDonald Fraser’s Harry Flashman and Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder characters set in the grim, dark world of the Warhammer 40K games. While I have that collection, the Ciaphas Cain novels I spent the last week or so with were Death or Glory and Cain’s Last Stand, both of which take place on the (largely) desert world of Perlia. The former involves Cain’s struggle to return to friendly lines after crash-landing smack in the middle of ork-occupied territory, in the course of which he becomes a planetary legend; in the latter, which is chronologically the last Cain novel, he comes out of retirement when Warmaster Varan and the 13th Black Crusade arrive on Perlia. Both great brain candy, and available as part of the omnibus Ciaphas Cain: Defender of the Imperium along with a third novel, the short story “Traitor’s Gambit”, and a new intro by Sandy Mitchell.

*Dead tree edition is out of print, but it’s available as an e-book through Baen.


Category: Books
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