The Other McCain

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

The Progressive Myth of ‘Diversity’

Posted on | November 24, 2015 | 32 Comments

“The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”
— Thomas Sowell, 1998

In his 2012 book The Tyranny of Clichés, Jonah Goldberg recounts the pinnacle of his career, when the inclusion of his column (and the discontinuation of left-wing columnist Robert Scheer) caused Barbra Streisand to cancel her subscription to the Los Angeles Times in a 2005 letter that is a memorable example of bad writing and wrong ideas:

The greater Southern California community is one that not only proudly embraces its diversity but demands it. Your publisher’s decision to fire Robert Scheer is a great disservice to the spirit of our community. . . .
[Y]our new leadership, especially that of [publisher] Jeff Johnson, is entirely out of touch with [readers] and their desire to be exposed to views that stretch them beyond their own paradigms. So although the number of contributors to your op-ed pages may have increased, in firing Robert Sheer and putting Jonah Goldberg in his place, the gamut of voices has undeniably been diluted, and I suspect this may ultimately decrease the number of readers of those same pages.

Of course, Robert Scheer is a tediously predictable writer, a sort of fossil remnant of an earlier era when enthusiastic support of the Sandinistas and demands for a “nuclear freeze” were major issues for the anti-American Left. Despite the fact that the Los Angeles Times had many left-wing columnists — and that Jonah Goldberg was among the few conservative columnists for the paper — Ms. Streisand insisted, without the paradigm-stretching views of Robert Scheer, “the gamut of voices” (???) was undeniably diluted. From her multimillion-dollar beachfront mansion in Malibu, Ms. Streisand proclaimed that the newspaper’s publisher was “entirely out of touch” with readers who were demanding the kind of “diversity” that only Robert Scheer (a geriatric radical born in 1936) could provide them. Accusing a Democrat of committing “the most atrocious act of terrorism in world history” — which is how Robert Scheer described Harry Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb in 1945 — certainly stretches the paradigm, eh?

This kind of knee-jerk anti-Americanism arises from the elitist attitude that defines the Left. Believing themselves endowed with moral and intellectual superiority, progressives harbor a limitless contempt for the Ordinary American. If the typical resident of Normalville, U.S.A., is a patriotic flag-waver, the progressive believes, any flag-waving patriot is an ignorant fool. By the same token, when contrasted with Robert Scheer’s comrades in Berkeley and Ms. Streisand’s wealthy friends in Malibu, the folks in Normalville, U.S.A., are more likely to be heterosexual Christians who enjoy hunting and fishing and football and NASCAR. Because small-town people are also more likely to vote Republican — which is the worst thing anyone could ever do, from the Scheer/Streisand Berkeley/Malibu perspective — then everything about their lives must be subjected to mocking ridicule. “Redneck dimwits! So ignorant they probably believe it was a good thing we nuked Hiroshima! Let’s insult them by calling Harry Truman a terrorist!”

Progressives do not believe in a “diversity” that would permit the residents of Normalville, U.S.A., to think of themselves as deserving a respect equal to the respect demanded by residents of Berkeley and Malibu. Those of us out here in the small towns of America, folks who believe in God, who love our families and feel a sense of patriotic loyalty to our nation’s traditions — well, we are so inferior to the likes of Barbra Streisand that she cannot even be said to hate us, because we are simply too insignificant to notice. The elite support progressive policies because these policies function to deprive the Ordinary American of political representation. The beliefs and attitudes of patriotic Americans are condemned as racist, sexist and homophobic, so that anyone who speaks for the values of Normalville, U.S.A., can be excluded from the institutions (academia, journalism, entertainment) that influence the political process. There are no Republicans in the sociology department for the same reason the New York Times will never hire a Christian editor, nor would Hollywood ever make a movie that implied a negative judgment of the Charlie Sheen Lifestyle:

Video surfaces showing HIV-positive Charlie Sheen ‘performing oral sex on another man and smoking crack-cocaine’ in 2011.
The clips reportedly show the actor, 50, performing oral sex on another man and smoking crack-cocaine out of a pipe in a Las Vegas hotel room . . .
The other man in the video reportedly sued Sheen for giving him herpes.

Do you believe sodomy is a bad thing? Well, you can’t be permitted to say that in Malibu or Berkeley — nor on any university campus — where progressive “diversity” means your opinion is excluded from consideration, and no one who agrees with you would dare to say so.

Democrats believe in “diversity” in much the same way as Hitler believed in Aryan superiority, and for the same reason, because such fanatical beliefs justify the annihilation of a hated Enemy.





 

Category: Celebrities, Intellectuals, Media Bias, Progressivism

The Academic Temple Cult

Posted on | November 24, 2015 | 27 Comments

While university administrators surrender to protest mobs of young barbarians, we behold the decline of cultural literacy:

Not only are way too many of today’s students not getting a basic grounding in these things from their schools, but they’re probably not getting it from way too many of their parents, either. No wonder so many of them are willing to throw away freedom of speech in the name of protecting minorities’ feelings — they don’t even know what freedom of speech is or what it means, or why we have it in the first place.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Our education system is no longer primarily concerned with teaching facts, but instead has become a Temple Cult of Social Justice that exists to indoctrinate students with “progressive” attitudes and beliefs. In his book Up From Liberalism — published in 1959, the year I was born — William F. Buckley Jr. wrote:

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”

Eugene Volokh documents an example of this phenomenon:

Valerie Ashby, the new dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University . . . said in response to a student question complaining about various supposedly intolerant scholarship and other statements by various faculty members at Duke and elsewhere:

I am going to every single department and saying to the faculty, these are our values, and then holding chairs really accountable, that we’re training chairs, and then holding them accountable for what’s happening in your departments.
We’re also really working on . . . the new faculty who step in the door, and really trying to teach them, these are our values, this is what’s tolerable here, this is what’s not, this is how we feel about these things. And at every point of their evaluation, and at every point of — chance where we have an opportunity to make a decision about whether or not you are Duke, we are evaluating the — we will evaluate the entirety of the person.
And so you can’t be a great scholar, and be intolerant. You have to go.

Annual tuition at Duke University is $49,341 and no one may be employed as faculty at Duke who does not share the “values” that Dean Valerie Ashby is in charge of enforcing. She is not an educator, but an indoctrinator — the commissar of a totalitarian regime that demands ideological conformity. If you’re wondering what Dean Ashby meant by “our values,” in 2004 a group of conservative students at Duke exposed the faculty’s Democrat Party allegiances:

The students had identified party affiliation by using registration records available to the public. Their chart revealed that of the deans serving schools of Duke University, nine were registered Democrats and only one was registered as a Republican. In the Department of Art History, faculty included fourteen Democrats, one unaffiliated, and no Republicans. What about the Department of Cultural Anthropology? The chart revealed eleven Democrats, two unaffiliated, and no Republicans. English? The department includes eighteen Democrats, one unaffiliated, and a single Republican. The Department of History included thirty-two Democrats, four unaffiliated and no Republicans. Literature, philosophy, and sociology, combined to total thirty-two Democrats, nine unaffiliated, and no Republicans. The only department with more than one Republican was the Department of Political Science which claimed twenty-six Democrats, one unaffiliated, and six Republicans. Apparently, “diversity” at Duke University means diversity for Democrats.

So, in total: 142 Democrats to 8 Republicans and in many departments at Duke there was not even one Republican professor. A student of history or sociology at Duke will almost certainly never encounter anyone on the faculty who ever voted Republican, and Dean Ashby’s job is to maintain the university’s partisan “values.” If this “sounds kinda intolerant,” it’s because it is intolerant. Parents who worked all their lives to be able to afford to send their kids to an elite university are spending money to pay professors who teach students to hate their parents. The real “rape culture” on campus is the faculty raping students’ minds.





 

Category: Education

Is Joyce Carol Oates The Source Of Obama’s Pollyanna Foreign Policy?

Posted on | November 23, 2015 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

Category: humor

Stand By For A Trump Mulligan

Posted on | November 23, 2015 | 27 Comments

by Smitty

The “deal” Trump is likely referring to is his agreement in September to sign a pledge not to run as an independent. He said at the time he was given the “assurance that I would be treated fairly” by RNC chairman Reince Priebus in return for signing the pledge.
The Wall Street Journal article referenced by Trump is titled “GOP Operative Plans ‘Guerrilla Campaign’ Against Donald Trump.”

  1. It’s blatantly obvious to even the most casual observer that Her Majesty’s best shot is a 1992 reprise.
    I’ve long suspected that DJT is just an incendiary mercenary. I also suspect that Her Majesty has sufficient dirt (irrespective of what she gave away via Chappaquaiddick) to bend pretty much anyone among the elite to Her Royal Will.
  2. The September détente between DJT and the GOP always looked like a convenience; DJT gets his ratings, and the GOP liquidates some smaller players.
  3. The question moves to when DJT has his Ross Perot ephiphany. The reason will be some sort of kerfuffle with the GOP.  Given that, how many of his anti-elite supporters are willing to play the Perot game again? I’ve said that I’ll vote Trump as a heckler veto of Jeb, because #NoMasBush. Short of that, though, He Of The Ridiculous Hairstyle can pound sand.
Category: Celebrities, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton

The Misogyny of Atheist Dudebros and the Godless Misandry of Lesbian Tumblrinas

Posted on | November 23, 2015 | 102 Comments

Sarah is a 20-year-old social work student with a radical feminist Tumblr blog — adorned by a rainbow-colored Wicca pentagram — who hates men almost as much as she hates God:

Overzealous atheists are 9 times out of 10 annoying racist misogynistic dudebros but in my opinion it’s totally justified for same sex attracted people to hate organised religion as a tool that has been used to oppress us for centuries.
Like yes to a certain extent it’s people just using religion to justify their already existing homophobic attitudes, but to say that religion (particularly christianity) doesn’t perpetuate homophobia is just a denial of reality for the sake of not stepping on any toes. F–k anyone’s Sky Daddy who apparently dictates who is and isn’t worthy of dignity and humanity.

That rant caused another Tumblr user to remark that “you really hate non-religious men,” and Sarah further amplified:

Actually I think a very large number of men are already misogynistic and racist and anti-theism is something that attracts men who are already predisposed to those traits because it gives them a sense of power and righteousness as well as a persecution narrative. (Think Richard Dawkins and The Amazing Atheist.)
But you’re absolutely right, the intro wasn’t the point of the post so I’m not sure why you’re ignoring everything else I’m saying in order to focus on how I’m such a big mean man hater.
I find it interesting that all it takes is for me to mention misogyny and I get accused of man hating. You’re reaching buddy.

Sarah’s blog was previously called “lesbolution,” and before that it was “grrrlfever,” but now it’s “frequentlypolitical.” These name changes, we may suppose, indicate the ideological shifts resulting from her increased feminist consciousness. “The personal is political,” as Carol Hanisch said, and studying the Tumblr blogs of young feminists offers a glimpse into the process by which their personal problems affect their radical politics and vice-versa. Sarah’s discourse suggests certain questions:

  1. Is Sarah correct that men like Richard Dawkins embrace atheism because it justifies their own prejudices?
  2. If the need for “a sense of power and righteousness as well as a persecution narrative” inspires men to become atheists, doesn’t a similar need inspire women to become feminists?
  3. Why would a lesbian feminist object to being called a “big mean man hater”? Isn’t feminist ideology merely an elaborate rationalization of such hatred? Indeed, didn’t Carol Hanisch coin the phrase “the personal is political” to justify the agenda of a movement based on mobilizing women’s anti-male rage?

No one at Sarah’s university would ever ask such questions. Academia today is off limits to Christians, who are quite nearly banned from employment in the faculty. The Christian student in the 21st-century university never encounters a professor who shares his faith, for the same reason he never hears a professor speak a word in favor of capitalism, patriotism or heterosexuality. Perhaps not every member of the faculty is a Marxist lesbian, but if any university employee dared suggest that there is anything wrong with being a Marxist lesbian, angry mobs of student protesters would demand that this employee — whether a tenured professor or a janitor — immediately be fired. Academia is now a Temple of the Cult of Social Justice, the major idols of which are Equality, Science and Progress, and whose Sacred Rites of Devotion are sodomy, abortion and treason (not necessarily in that order).

Academia long ago chose sides in the Culture War, and our universities are now actively engaged in the systematic destruction of Western civilization. Bill Buckley tried to warn us with God and Man at Yale, but few heeded the voice of the prophet crying in the wilderness, and the intellectual apostasy has overtaken us. Behold! Now we have “Christian” bloggers on Tumblr who insist that God should bless their lesbian weddings. This blasphemy involves a diabolical phenomenon known as “Side A theology,” a heresy whose original author goes by various names, among them Beelzebub and Mephistopheles.

Well, neither the atheist misogynist dudebros nor Sarah the radical lesbian feminist believe in all that Bible stuff, but they all believe in Progress and at the rate we are progressing now, I think we shall soon reach our destination, at the end of a certain well-known highway that is proverbially paved with good intentions.





 

Category: Sex Trouble

Sen. Free Stuff (D-Awesome)

Posted on | November 23, 2015 | 45 Comments

 

His economic ideas are as obsolete as Eugene V. Debs, his foreign policy proposals can be summarized in two words — unilateral disarmament — and yet the socialist senator from Vermont inspires orgasmic enthusiasm from Generation Selfie:

It’s about the millennial generation and how they just love Bernie Sanders, the oldest white man in the 2016 presidential race. Old white men were like the devil until one of them started promising all sorts of free stuff, now he’s the man of choice for the entitled generation.
I guess this isn’t really a surprise, they’ve been indoctrinated in progressivism since at least kindergarten. The economy is sluggish and hasn’t fully recovered since 2008. They have mountains of student loan debt because nobody bothered to tell them that spending $200K on a degree in gender studies probably wasn’t a good investment. And don’t even get me started on the disaster known as Obamacare. You would think they would have had enough after 7 years of progressive leadership, but all of this new technology has brought us a generation of idiots whose political education comes from memes they see on social media. So why wouldn’t they fall in love with the cranky old fellow who promises to retire their debts?
Unfortunately . . . they haven’t thought the whole thing through. Like, who is going to pay for all of their free stuff.

Like, who cares? Not thinking things through and expecting others to pay the bill for whatever they want, young “progressives” are as irresponsible as any toddler throwing a tantrum. The Democrat Party panders to them, and the ungrateful brats respond by throwing even louder tantrums.





 

Category: Democrats

‘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
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