The Other McCain

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

Santorum Says Immigration ‘Flooding This Country’ With Low-Wage Workers

Posted on | October 30, 2015 | 14 Comments

Allan Wall calls attention to an exchange in Wednesday’s “undercard” debate in which Rick Santorum discussed the economic impact of immigration on America’s working class:

[W]e have the lowest labor participation rate in 50 years and we also have the slowest growth in wages in the history of our country, any 20-year period. In fact, the last quarter had the lowest wage growth ever recorded.
And so you look at the fact that we’ve brought in 35 million — 35 million legal and illegal immigrants over the last 20 years, more than any period in American history, we have low wages, low participation [rates]. . . .
We have an immigration policy that Senator Graham supported that brings in even more low wage workers into this country. He says he wants to solve problems, that’s great. But you’re not solving problems for American wage earners. You’re not solving problems for workers in America who have seen their wages flat line and have been disaffected enough to leave the workplace.
We need to get better training and better skills, including vocational education and . . . community colleges. But the bottom line is, we have to make sure that we are not flooding this country with competition for low wage workers.

This is important to understand. Arguments over immigration policy are always about numbers. The accusations of “hate” and “racism” flung around by advocates of unlimited immigration (e.g., Lindsey Graham) ignore the basic question of numbers. The United States is a nation of 320 million people and we could, with little difficult, absorb and assimilate 200,000 immigrants annually. But between legal and illegal immigration, we have had at least three times that number every year for the past 20 years. It is this excess immigration — especially what Santorum rightly describes as a flood of illegals from Mexico — that is the source of controversy. For the sake of having a clear policy debate, we may leave aside any questions surrounding the language and customs of immigrants and focus simply on this issue of numbers. Santorum is correct that the downward pressure on working-class wages is a major consequence of our immigration policy (or lack thereof). Economics is always about numbers, and it is important to stress this point.

Unless and until we are willing to talk about immigration in terms of a target number for annual immigration (and, as I say, 200,000 a year would seem entirely reasonable), then we will continue to be distracted by irrelevant objections. The accusation of “racism” is such a distraction. Liberals always racism everywhere in America and, because they know Americans don’t like being called racists, these accusations are used by liberals to intimidate their opponents into silence.




 

Category: Immigration, Rick Santorum

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | October 30, 2015 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

One last dip in the road separated Korban and his troops from Korbill Tower, highlighted by the moon on the hill.
They were far enough up a side valley from River Myzods that the rolling countryside was untouched by disaster.
As they passed a copse on the right side of the road, a bat-like thing took flight, briefly highlighted against the moon.
That was no native bird. They knew.
So much for time to rest and heal. Hopefully Zygiell’d had survived and would rally here. The kingdom was broken, and he had no plan beyond “Kill orcs.” Which was insufficient.

via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

‘Rape Culture’ Rhetoric as Bad Poetry

Posted on | October 29, 2015 | 89 Comments

Alleged poet Rupi Kaur (@rupikaur_)

Just when you think feminism cannot possibly become more absurd, they always manage to push beyond the limits of imagination.

sex takes the consent of two
if one person is lying there not doing anything
cause they are not ready
or not in the mood
or simply don’t want to
yet the other is having sex
with their body it’s not love
is is rape

That is a “poem” by Rupi Kaur, a young Toronto-based feminist whose work has been celebrated by the Huffington Post:

Rupi Kaur’s first book, Milk and Honey is the poetry collection every woman needs on her nightstand or coffee table. Accompanied by her own sketches, the beautifully honest poems read like the everyday, collective experiences of today’s modern woman. She experiences love, loss, pain and healing in different chapters of her life. Sometimes she feels as though she has shattered in a million pieces but eventually, she finds strength after picking up the pieces and ultimately survives. Reading the book, is like getting the hug you need on a rainy day, the catharsis you crave after a tragedy.

Just kill me now, please. I’ve seen too much.

If you were to subject this to the kind of mockery it deserves, you would certainly be denounced as a misogynist. But why must such insipid expressions of mundane emotion be treated as if Rupi Kaur has said something profound? What is it about feminism that makes it function as a force-field protecting this kind of mediocre dreck from criticism and ridicule? Surely, there have been excellent women poets in history, and there must be genuinely talented women poets alive in the world today. Rupi Kaur is not one of them, however, and it is an insult to women to expect them to pretend that Rupi Kaur has real talent.

Permit me to observe that Rupi Kaur is saying less, and saying it much less persuasively, than any good pop song would say. Back when I was a kid, we didn’t need feminism — or any kind of campus orientation lecture about “affirmative consent” — to make sense of our feelings about love and sex. We had rock-and-roll and soul music written and sung by some of the greatest lyric poets in the history of the English language.

There’s a rose in the fisted glove
And the eagle flies with the dove,
And if you can’t be with the one you love,
Honey, love the one you’re with.

OK, so it’s not Shakespeare or Longfellow, but neither of those guys ever had a Top 40 hit. Here’s another classic:

Well, I’m running down the road,
Trying to loosen my load.
Got seven women on my mind:
Four that want to own me,
Two that want to stone me,
One says she’s a friend of mine.
Take it easy.

Hey, you may not think that’s profound, but when I was 17 years old, I could totally relate to that. Here’s another one:

Always and forever,
Each moment with you
Is just like a dream for me
That somehow came true.
And I know tomorrow
Will still be the same,
‘Cause we’ve got a life of love
That won’t ever change.

You’re never gonna get something like that from Rupi Kaur. No feminist is ever going to write the kind of poetry that you want to put to a slow jazzy six-eight beat, so couples can hold each other close and sway together under the magic sparkling light of a rotating mirror ball.

Back in the day, our romantic expectations were expressed through a shared musical vocabulary. You could ask a girl, “What kind of music do you like?” And her answers would tell you a lot about her. When I was a teenage boy learning to play guitar, I sang a lot of Beatles songs — “In My Life” was one — and eventually figured out that old Sam Cooke tunes had a special magic. Elvis, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, the Beach Boys — you could learn a lot about love from the classics of rock-and-roll, lessons you’ll never get from the grim ideologues of feminism, who expect us to believe Rupi Kaur is a poetic genius.

Nah, sweetheart. You don’t know nothing about poetry.

Tonight you’re mine completely.
You give your love so sweetly.
Tonight the light of love is in your eyes.
Will you still love me tomorrow? . . .

Tonight with words unspoken.
You tell me I’m the only one.
But will my heart be broken
When the night meets the morning sun?

That, my friends, is poetry. Rupi Kaur has never written anything nearly as true or beautiful as that, and I doubt she ever will.

(Hat-tip: @DateOffCampus on Twitter.)

UPDATE: Charles Hill wrote about the moral aspects of that 1961 Shirelles classic — co-written by the immortal Carole King — more than a decade ago. Time flies in the blogosphere!




 

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 10.29.15

Posted on | October 29, 2015 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 10.29.15

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
Proof Positive: Waiting For The Donald
EBL: CNBC Debate
Michelle Malkin: A Closetful Of Hillary Clinton’s Immigration Costumes
Twitchy: Haven’t Had Enough Of John Harwood’s Bias, You Say?


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Far-Left CNBC Moderators Lose Control Of Third GOP Debate
American Thinker: Thirteen Reasons We Shouldn’t Admit Muslim “Refugees”
Conservatives4Palin: Governor Palin Talks About Her Political Future
Don Surber: Carson’s Manager – “We Don’t Need To Be Led Around Like Prize Steers”
Jammie Wearing Fools: CNBC Hacks Whine After Disastrous Debate Performance
Joe For America: Why Are Veterans Mad At Hillary?
JustOneMinute: Debate Night!
Pamela Geller: INVASION – FIVE MILLION Muslims March On Europe – “We Cannot Guarantee The Public Safety Any More”
Shot In The Dark: How Bad Were The CNBC Moderators?
STUMP: Public Pension Follies – Divestment! Divest From All The Dirty Things!
The Gateway Pundit: Hannity On CNBC Debate – “This Is Going To Go Down In History As A REALLY BAD Night For The Media”
The Jawa Report: Fatwa This! Islamic State! Danger! Romance!
The Lonely Conservative:
This Ain’t Hell: 18th Century Technology Baffles Navy, Military
Weasel Zippers: Two More Police Unions Join In Call For Boycott Of Tarantino Films
Megan McArdle: Some Dumb Questions And Some Smart Answers
Mark Steyn: He Was Just Seventeen. You Know What I Mean.


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Category: Linkagery

Rubio Knocks Out Jeb Bush in Debate

Posted on | October 29, 2015 | 24 Comments

 

The general consensus, and also my own personal opinion, is that Marco Rubio was the big winner of Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate on CNBC. Polls have shown Rubio stuck in the second tier behind the two “outsider” candidates who are the current front-runners, Donald Trump and Ben Carson. Rubio is young, smart and articulate, but his role in the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty plan has hurt him with the GOP’s conservative grassroots. Wednesday night, however, when Rubio was criticized for missing Senate votes while campaigning for president, he counter-attacked sharply:

“In 2008, Barack Obama missed 60 or 70% of his votes and the same newspaper endorsed him again. This is another example of the double standard that exists in this country, between the mainstream media and the conservatives.”

Turning the question around to focus on the pro-Democrat double standard of the “mainstream media” was a smart move. Rubio then got a surprise bonus when Jeb Bush called on him to resign, giving Rubio an opening for this brutal jab:

“Jeb, let me tell you, I don’t remember you ever complaining about John McCain’s vote record. The only reason you’re doing it now is because we’re running for the same position. Someone convinced you attacking me is going to help you.”

Boom! Bush’s campaign had been on the ropes and if he thought he could make a comeback by attacking Rubio, he thought wrong. This move was both “strategically ill-conceived and tactically incompetent,” to quote Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard.

Now, what does this mean? To make clear my own preference, I support any candidate not named “Hillary Clinton.” After eight years of Obama’s presidency, it is crucial for America’s future that the Democrats not get a third term, and I will be willing to back whoever gets the GOP nomination. Trump, Carson, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Rand Paul, whoever. Everybody knows my longstanding support for Rick Santorum, and I do not rule out the possibility that Rick might yet pull off another Iowa miracle like he did in 2012. However, the main thing — the Big Picture — is that all of the Republican candidates are better than Hillary and, in a few weeks, voters in Iowa are going to reduce the oversized GOP field down to four or maybe five viable candidates.

Marco Rubio could be one of those. Jeb Bush certainly will not.

Bush is done. He is over, doomed, kaput, finito. If the Republican Establishment big money boys can’t see that, they’re even dumber than I previously thought they were, and I have always thought Stupid Guys With Too Much Money were the root cause of the GOP’s electoral and political problems. Their hopes for a restoration of the Bush dynasty — because this is what Stupid Guys With Too Much Money dream of, like a 12-year-old girl dreams of dating Harry Styles — are now at an end. It’s time to wake up and smell the futility.

So a half-dozen GOP Establishment consultants will soon be unemployed after Jeb gives his “spend more time with my family” speech, and this is good news for America. We will be spared another Bush, and can now focus our attention on avoiding another Clinton.

There is still hope for the future. Thank God.





 

Category: Debates, Election, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Republicans

The Man In The High Castle

Posted on | October 28, 2015 | 18 Comments

— by Wombat-socho


Apologies for the lack of book posts, but last week was pretty much eaten by work leading up to the October 15 extension deadline, medical appointments, and other craziness. This week I want to talk a little bit about The Man In The High Castle, originally a book by Philip K. Dick, and now a TV series by Ridley Scott and Frank Spotnitz for Amazon Prime Video. The book won the Hugo for Best Novel of 1963, back when Hugos actually meant something, and is an alternate history set fifteen years after the United States lost World War II in 1947. Most of the former United States are part of the Greater German Reich; the three Pacific states plus Nevada, Arizona, and parts of New Mexico, Idaho, and Utah belong to a Japanese puppet state, the Pacific States of America; and the remaining pieces of the country between are a neutral zone, sometimes called the Rocky Mountain States or more often, the Neutral Zone. I last read Dick’s book decades ago, and I have to say after watching the first two episodes of the TV series, Scott and Spotnitz have produced something better than the original book. The subversive novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is now a series of “newsreels” distributed by the Resistance, there have been some changes in the cast of characters, but above all, Scott and Spotnitz have introduced a sense of hallucinatory, paranoid surrealism that didn’t exist in the original book, which was a fairly straightforward alternate history along the lines of one of its inspirations, Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee – which itself is worth reading, for its depiction of the Union as a Third World backwater in the wake of a Civil War defeat, if nothing else. Getting back to the series…what struck me most is that it has a cast full of unreliable narrators. Nothing the characters say can be taken on faith as correct, there is reason to believe that “past” is not what it is claimed to be, and there are strong implications that the “newsreels” are not homemade movies, but rather leaks from our timeline. Can’t wait for the next eight episodes to come out next month!


One of the only other science-fictional things I’ve been reading is Edward P. Hughes’ Masters of the Fist, a post-apocalyptic tale about a small village in Ireland facing a number of problems, security and the infertility of the local menfolk being the two most pressing. Enter Sergeant O’Meara of the Grenadier Guards and his stolen Challenger MBT…like the first reviewer, I came across some of the stories in this fix-up novel by way of Jerry Pournelle’s There Will Be War anthologies, and appreciated the sometimes dark, sometimes madcap humor in these tales. Decent brain candy.


The other is Stark’s War, the first in a trilogy written by John Hemry before he took up writing The Lost Fleet novels and went with his birth name of John Campbell. Stark’s War was somewhat of a nightmare for a veteran NCO like me; the picture it paints of a military so isolated from its country that someone in the ranks who was born civilian and not mil is a very rare bird indeed, and an officer corps so addicted to micromanagement and apple-polishing that it no longer recognizes the realities of combat are just two of the many unsettling plot elements of this novel about an American hyperpower as it exists in the mind of the Loony Left: so dominant in terms of economic and military power that no nation or alliance of nations on Earth can stand up to it – which is why Sergeant Stark and his troops of the First Division are raiding foreign installations on the Moon. Good book, perhaps because of the premise and not in spite of it; now available for the Kindle, which is good.


Worth noting: John C. Wright’s “My Elves Are Different”, a meditation on the generation gap in fantasy readers, which was inspired by Jeffro’s Appendix N Survey. Also, a fisking of that gigantic retard Steve Davidson, who runs the Amazing Stories site, by a fellow named Dystopic, who dealt with Davidson’s criticism of an LJ post of mine on the social history of fandom so I didn’t have to.


And what have you been reading in this week before Halloween?





Category: Books, Linkagery, Video

What No One Can Say on Campus

Posted on | October 28, 2015 | 33 Comments

“So what is feminism? What do feminists believe? Namely, that American women are oppressed by a patriarchy hell-bent on keeping women down, and that men and marriage are expendable. . . .
“What feminists want is to make men and women interchangeable. . . .
“I am not a feminist because I don’t believe feminists have an accurate understanding of human nature.”
— Susanne Venker

Great minds think alike, and Suzanne Venker sees the problem with feminism exactly as I see the problem with feminism. It is a War Against Human Nature aimed at using the coercive power of government to bring about an androgynous “equality” that ignores the actual differences between men and women. Feminism is a totalitarian movement to destroy civilization as we know it — and feminists say so themselves.

In her recent book Beauty and Misogyny, feminist Professor Sheila Jeffreys cites Andrea Dworkin as authority for indicting “the notion of beauty” as a “cultural practice . . . damaging to women,” an expression of “woman-hating culture.” Professor Jeffreys quotes Dworkin’s 1974 book Woman Hating, specifically this sentence from Page 26:

“We recognize that it is the structure of the culture which engineers the deaths, violations, violence, and we look for alternatives, ways of destroying culture as we know it, rebuilding it as we can imagine it.” [Emphasis added.]

On the very first page of that book, Dworkin declared feminism a “fundamental revolutionary commitment,” explaining that the purpose of her “analysis of sexism” was “transformation of the social reality on every level . . . the development of revolutionary program and consciousness.” Feminism is a revolution to destroy “culture as we know it,” and can only be understood in terms of its essentially destructive purpose. It is too seldom mentioned nowadays that modern feminist movement emerged from the radical New Left of the 1960s. Shulamith Firestone used a mailing list of women involved in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to help organize what became known as the Women’s Liberation Movement. They staged their first major national protest at the 1968 Miss America pageant, an event they said served “to further make women oppressed and men oppressors; to enslave us all the more in high-heeled, low-status roles.”

This claim that women are oppressed and enslaved by men remains the essential premise of feminist ideology and, as Suzanne Venker says, feminists insist that all women are victims of a “patriarchy hell-bent on keeping women down.” Feminism is a revolutionary movement to destroy this alleged oppression, “to make men and women interchangeable” in such a way that men would become “expendable” and irrelevant to women’s lives. How could this be accomplished?

“Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse have written about the sexual dilemmas of modern civilization and proposed solutions combining aspects of Freudian theory and Marxian economic analysis. . . .
“Reich’s analysis introduces the theoretical insight that women and gays have known instinctively: that civilization in its present form was designed for heterosexual men, and that its structure guarantees their authority within it. Thus, to change society by ending sexual suppression does not mean the end of civilization, but rather the end of civilization as we know it. . . .
“It was Herbert Marcuse who saw the critical function of homosexuals in ending repression. . . . Marcuse sees homosexuals as having an important place in history in helping to free sexuality, since he feels gay people have a more natural, totally erogenous sexuality.”
— Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love, Sappho Was a Right-On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism (1972)

If you buy this weird mix of Freud and Marx, if you believe that sexual “repression” and male “authority” are the root of all evil, and that “gay people have a more natural, totally erogenous sexuality” — well, if you believe all that, congratulations, you’re a feminist.

However, if you disagree with that — if you think Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse were a couple of dangerous kooks and are skeptical about a plan for “the end of civilization as we know it,” to bring about a society controlled by the authority of “liberated” lesbians — well, you’re never going to be allowed to speak at Williams College:

Williams College students invited Suzanne Venker, a writer and longtime critic of feminism, to speak Tuesday night, but changed their minds and took back the invite for her talk, “One Step Forward, Ten Steps Back: Why Feminism Fails.”
Venker had been invited to participate in a student-run, alumni-funded speaking series at Williams called “Uncomfortable Learning.” The program’s purpose is to expose students to controversial voices and opinions they might not otherwise hear. Many of the speakers tend to be conservative or people whose views don’t square with those of most students.
The students who run the series decided to cancel the event, co-president Zach Wood explained, after its Facebook page began to attract acerbic comments and “things got a little out of hand.” . . .
The concern, Wood explained, was that “people would get riled up while she was speaking,” maybe even throw things, and there wasn’t time before the event to organize security. “You never know,” he said. “We’re just trying to think ahead here. The last thing we wanted to do was do something destructive.”

You see how it is. Feminists in 1968 could denounce the Miss America pageant, lesbians in 1972 could cite Marxists and proclaim the wonders of “totally erogenous sexuality,” and Andrea Dworkin in 1974 could advocate a revolution “destroying culture as we know it,” but in 2015, no one is permitted to criticize feminism on a college campus.

American college students are living under a regime of intellectual totalitarianism. No one who dissents from this regime can appear on campus because “people would get riled up.”

You can read the full text of the speech Suzanne Venker planned to give at Williams College, but students at Williams College are prohibited from hearing what Suzanne Venker says — it is forbidden and impermissible. The soi-disant student journalists at Williams College declare that “Venker’s views are wrong, offensive and unacceptable.”

Annual tuition at Williams College is $50,070 — parents are paying good money to make sure that their children never have to listen to anyone who might get them “riled up” by telling the truth about feminism.

In her book The War on Men, Suzanne Venker argues that “modern feminism . . . has severed the bond between the sexes, pitting men and women against one another,” that “the sexual revolution was a disaster. Men today have no respect for women and vice versa.” This is so obviously true that only stupid people (or Williams College students) could disagree, much less get “riled up” about it.

If Williams College ever gets nuclear weapons, we’re all doomed.




 

Category: Education, Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 10.28.15

Posted on | October 28, 2015 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: The Force Awakens
Da Tech Guy: Milo Yiannopoulos, Pope Francis, And The Stuff That Saints Are Made Of
First Street Journal: It’s Just A Shame That The People Now Have More Of A Voice!
Proof Positive: Mirror, Mirror…Why Can’t I Catch A Break?
Camp of the Saints: Ghost Soldiers Of Jihad?
Doug Powers: Typical – Hillary Pledges To Protect “Law Abiding” Illegals She Was “Adamantly Against” Just A Few Years Ago
Twitchy: Team Hillary Swings Into Damage Control Mode After VA Comments Backfire


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Hungary PM Orban Rejects Merkel’s “Welcoming” Ideology Of Unchecked Immigration Suicide
American Thinker: Police Fired For Telling The Truth About Black Violence
Conservatives4Palin: John Kasich Reveals Himself
Don Surber: Same Excrement, Different Piehole
Jammie Wearing Fools: Dopey Hillary Supporters Can’t Name Any Accomplishments
Joe For America: Americans, Take Notes – Ban Islam, Save The Nation!
JustOneMinute: Dopey Hillary Supporters Can’t Name Any Accomplishments
Pamela Geller: Europe Now Scrambling For Guns, Shotguns Have “Virtually Sold Out” In Austria
Protein Wisdom: LA Religious Leaders Denounce Hate Group #BlackLivesMatter
Shot In The Dark: The World Is Their Safe Room
STUMP: Illinois Lottery – You Can’t Fool People Forever
The Gateway Pundit: Reporter Says Yuge Trump Rally In Sioux City Sets Gold Standard For Presidential Campaigns
The Jawa Report: Jawa Report Issues Devil Will Do Meetballs From UR Body Fatwa Against W.H.O.
The Lonely Conservative: Obamacare, It Just Keeps Getting Worse
This Ain’t Hell: S/SGT Justin Druskis Booted For Stolen Valor
Weasel Zippers: Homeland Security Offering Employers Cash If They Hire Illegal College Grads
Megan McArdle: Preschool Helps Kids. Sometimes. Briefly.
Mark Steyn: The Certainty Of Uncertainty


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