The Other McCain

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

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

FMJRA 2.0: Sold Me Down The River

Posted on | October 3, 2015 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Sunday: Roll Tide!
Animal Magnetism
Proof Positive
A View from the Beach
Batshit Crazy News
Ninety Miles from Tyranny

General: Military ‘Degraded’ by Obama
The Pirate’s Cove
Constantinople Not Istanbul
A View from the Beach

You Had One Job
Dustbury

FMJRA 2.0: Face Down In The Biltong
The Pirate’s Cove
Blur Brain
A View from the Beach
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox, 09.29.15
Proof Positive
Batshit Crazy News

That Time Hillary, Huma, Nancy, and Michelle Got Together To Commiserate
Batshit Crazy News

Reports: Chris Harper Mercer, 26, Identified as #UCCShooting Gunman
Living In Anglo-America
Regular Right Guy
A View from the Beach
Batshit Crazy News

Gunman Kills 10 in Shooting Spree at Community College in Oregon
Regular Right Guy
A View from the Beach
Batshit Crazy News

In The Mailbox, 10.01.15
Regular Right Guy
Proof Positive
Batshit Crazy News

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge
Batshit Crazy News

Props to @cypherdog on Twitter
Batshit Crazy News

A Harvard-Educated Feminist
Batshit Crazy News


Top linkers this week:

  1.  Batshit Crazy News (11)
  2.  A View from the Beach (5)


Thanks to everyone for their linkagery!


The Alarm – Standards

Category: FMJRA Award

A Harvard-Educated Feminist

Posted on | October 2, 2015 | 60 Comments

Sarah Marian Seltzer (@sarahmseltzer) is a feminist and a fool, but I repeat myself. You never heard of her, and I hadn’t, either. Then one of her tweets — advocating “a human blockade around NRA headquarters” — came to my attention, and I wondered, “Who is this idiot?”

Habitual curiosity about people with bad ideas has led me many strange places during my long research into radical feminism. Before news broke of the Oregon shooting Thursday, I was contemplating a 1979 speech by lesbian feminist Adrienne Rich, included in her 1986 anthology, Blood, Bread, and Poetry. The title of her speech, given as the commencement address at elite Smith College, was “What Does a Woman Need to Know?” A few brief excerpts:

Suppose we were to ask ourselves simply: What does a woman need to know to become a self-conscious, self-defining human being? . . .
Doesn’t she need to know how seemingly natural states of being, like heterosexuality, like motherhood, have been enforced and institutionalized to deprive her of power? . . .
The belief that established science and scholarship — which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making — are “objective” and “value-free” and that feminist studies are “unscholarly,” “biased,” and “ideological” dies hard. . . . And the ideology of education you have just spent four years acquiring in a women’s college has been largely, if not entirely, the ideology of white male supremacy, a construct of male subjectivity.

Now, at risk of running down a rabbit-hole, let me ask the reader to imagine that spring day at Smith College in 1979.

Imagine yourself the parent of one of the graduating seniors. You worked hard for your money, and you and your spouse devoted yourself to your daughter’s education, intending for her to have the very best opportunities in life. Every possible advantage that you, as a parent, could give your daughter — a home library stocked with good books, subscriptions to quality magazines, museum visits, vacation trips to historic sites, and so forth — helped her to become a high-achieving student. Not merely did you spend money to provide her with these advantages, you also did the necessary work of parent as supervisor, protecting your child from harmful influences. You made sure your girl didn’t become a drug-addled loser hanging around with juvenile delinquents. All of these things you did, in order to qualify your daughter to attend what certainly once was, and arguably still is, one of the finest educational institutions for women in the entire world.

Imagine yourself, then, as a parent who had done everything necessary to send your daughter to Smith College (the list of alumnae include Nancy Reagan, Class of ’43, and Barbara Bush, Class of ’47), and when you show up for her graduation, the commencement speaker is a radical lesbian who denounces heterosexuality and motherhood as “enforced . . . to deprive her of power” (!) and who condemns “established science” as “the ideology of white male supremacy”! Would it not seem to you that the administration of Smith had been taken over by maniacs? As a tuition-paying parent, wouldn’t you feel you had been hoodwinked, scammed, bamboozled, ripped off, and otherwise defrauded? Wouldn’t you think that all your effort to provide your daughter an elite education and protect her from harmful influences was a complete waste of time and money? Frankly, she might have been better off hanging around the roller rink as a teenager, smoking Marlboros and making out with hoodlum boys in the backseats of their hopped-up GTOs.

Go back and read Bill Buckley’s classic God and Man at Yale, which first called attention to the problem of what we might call academic gnosticism in American cultural life. After he published that book in 1951, Buckley was denounced as a bigot and a reactionary for daring to suggest that our nation’s scholarly elite were guilty of bad stewardship. Buckley accused the administration at Yale of failing to provide students the kind of moral and intellectual guidance that their parents (and Yale alumni) expected from this prestigious institution. Yale had betrayed its own Christian heritage and, in doing so, was not only defrauding the parents and alumni who paid the bills, but was also quite literally sabotaging America, by perverting the minds of the nation’s future leaders. This accusation was quite controversial in 1951, but was much less so during the 1960s, when academia’s liberal leadership proved its moral bankruptcy by surrendering to the insolence of student radicals.

When shotgun-wielding militants took over Cornell University in 1969, everybody with two eyes and a brain could see the consequences of a moral erosion that the scholastic establishment had not merely permitted, but had actively assisted. By 1979, when Smith College brought Adrienne Rich to campus to denounce heterosexuality, motherhood and “established science” for the benefit of the graduating seniors, the institutional collapse of academia’s moral authority was a historical fact. No one in America expects college professors to provide anything like moral guidance to the young. Indeed, we nowadays take for granted that the faculty lounge is overcrowded with perverts and lunatics of one sort or another. If not all the professors are molesting their students, it’s only because the creepy old faculty freaks are afraid even tenure would not protect them from a Title IX lawsuit. Would any responsible parent want their son or daughter to be “mentored” by the kind of wackos and weirdos who teach at American universities? Academia in the 21st century seems to be inhabited entirely by the kind of people George Orwell once described thus:

“One sometimes gets the impression that the
mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards
them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist,
sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack,
pacifist, and feminist in England.”

Such people are now in charge of higher education in the United States, and have been for many decades, so that there are very few “educated” Americans who would read Adrienne Rich’s 1979 speech and think, “What wicked madness is this?” The whole purpose of our education system is to indoctrinate young people with the “progressive” attitudes approved by the intellectual elite. Even if the students at elite schools do not themselves become nudists, sex-maniacs, pacifists and so forth, they know that they must never speak disapprovingly of radicals, perverts or bohemians. 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, and it is not the least bit shocking to learn that Thursday’s massacre on the campus of a community college in Oregon was perpetrated by a young lunatic who exhibited a particular hatred for Christians. The extermination of American Christians is a measure that our intellectual elite very much endorse, although their preferred means of accomplishing this are (a) contraception, (b) abortion, (c) homosexuality, and (d) public schools.

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.

Thus we return, after that thousand-word digression, to the subject of Sarah Marian Seltzer, who popped into my view, as I say, because of her fanatical hatred of the National Rifle Association. That inspired me to click over and see her Twitter profile to answer the question, “Exactly who the heck is this zany moonbat?” Somebody who hates the Pope, considers Planned Parenthood a sacred cause, and shares with her parents a vehement opposition to the Republican Party. Where do these mindless Obama Zombies come from?

Harvard University, Class of 2005.

Ms. Seltzer was on the staff of the Crimson, a position she used to repudiate the university and its values. Harvard proved to be “a disappointment as an institution,” because of “the ambitious, busy, career-focused atmosphere,” whereas Ms. Seltzer had arrived at Harvard intending “to get ready to change the world.” Preparing for a job that might involve the production of goods and services in the commercial marketplace (i.e., capitalism) was something Ms. Seltzer disdained as being “ambitious” or “career-focused,” you see. It is not merely that Ms. Seltzer considers herself an aristocrat, viewing all business-related careers as crass endeavors beneath her personal dignity. No, she has shown a lifelong hostility toward for-profit free enterprise, dating back to high school, when she spent a summer as an intern “for a public interest group,” where she learned “the career-enhancing skill of harassing Nike for its labor abuses. My troupe of fellow interns flyered, hung up posters and took part in every picket line around town, from striking bodega workers to stealth banner drops at Niketown.” You may not be surprised that Ms. Seltzer subsequently engaged in journalistic celebration of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement:

Coming into my own as a journalist . . . I specialized in thoughtful, nuanced cultural critiques as well super-incendiary listicles skewering the right wing. My favorite work? Tailing the badass feminist contingent of Occupy Wall Street around for months, reporting on their organizing efforts.

This is what an anthropologist would recognize as tribal signification for young progressives: “Hey, I’m one of you! I hate capitalism so much, I walked picket lines against Nike. I skewer the right wing and support badass feminism!” She’s a walking cliché — a stereotype, a clone of every left-wing woman you’ve ever known — and it’s more than an educated guess to suppose that her parents were the kind of liberals who voted for Alan Cranston in the 1984 Democrat primaries, who supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who alternated between mocking Reagan as an inept “B-movie actor” and shrieking that Reagan was a dangerous madman conspiring to bring about a nuclear holocaust. (This is more than a guess, I say, because in her Harvard Crimson days, she described how her parents imbued her “with an idealistic distrust of ‘the system,'” and for liberals, “the system” is generally a synonym for capitalism.) It is astonishing, really, to think how common this kind of radical pose is among the soi-disant Best and Brightest, who attend universities where the annual tuition is higher than the median household income in most parts of the United States, yet feel compelled to embrace a politics they identify as aligned with the oppressed and downtrodden “masses.”

This is where I’m reminded of Adrienne Rich. The privileged daughter of a professor at Johns Hopkins, she attended Wellesley and married Alfred Conrad, a Harvard-educated economist. They had three sons and were living what most Americans would view as a very happy and prosperous life, but then the 1960s happened. Adrienne Rich grew restless with her privileged existence, and began dabbling in radical politics. Her husband was initially sympathetic and supportive:

[Conrad] joined her in hosting anti-Vietnam and Black Panther fundraising parties at their apartment. However, he quickly became exasperated: “She was becoming a very pronounced, very militant feminist,” says Hayden Carruth. “I don’t know what went on between them, except that Alf came to me and complained bitterly that Adrienne had lost her mind.”

In October 1970, Alfred Conrad committed suicide. This was, in retrospect, the signal achievement of Adrienne Rich’s feminist career, destroying her own husband as the emblematic personification of “white male supremacy,” and becoming the lesbian partner of Michelle Cliff. As a role model for how a woman becomes “a self-conscious, self-defining human being,” Adrienne Rich is perhaps the feminist ideal.

“The person is political,” as Carol Hanisch famously said, and each feminist is expected to wage war against male supremacy not merely as a matter of public policy, but also in every aspect of her private life. From the feminist perspective, therefore, Adrienne Rich’s father was her original oppressor, succeeded in turn by her husband Alfred Conrad and also, by her three sons. This is the fundamental premise of feminism, that all women are victims of patriarchal oppression, and that all men participate in and benefit from this systemic oppression.

What, then, of Sarah Marian Seltzer? She seems to consider herself oppressed by the Pope, the National Rifle Association and the Republican Party, but every liberal Democrat shares that sense of oppression. President Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, routinely pretends to be a helpless victim of Republican oppression, so there’s no real feminist traction for Ms. Seltzer in such a claim.

Maybe she’s oppressed by her employer. Ms. Seltzer is “Editor-at-Large” for Flavorwire.com, which is to say, she’s a blogger who produces about 35 posts a month for a site owned by web entrepreneurs Mark Mangan and Sascha Lewis. Obviously, these guys are a couple of slimy capitalist greedheads who get rich by exploiting Ms. Seltzer’s ill-paid labor. This is social injustice, comrades: Harvard graduate Sarah Seltzer compelled to toil away in obscurity as a member of the digital proletariat, cranking out insipid “content,” just so these rapacious exploiters can line their pockets with cash from advertisers. Yet everybody is a victim of capitalism, according to progressive Democrats, so there is no specifically feminist angle for Ms. Seltzer in this aspect of her life.

No, the real villain in this patriarchal tragedy must be her husband.

What? A feminist with a husband in 2015?

This makes no sense at all, after the decades of struggle to liberate women from this cruel yoke of slavery “enforced and institutionalized to deprive her of power,” as Adrienne Rich said. Strange as it may seem, however, Ms. Seltzer has been married since 2010 to Simon Vozick-Levinson, a Senior Editor at Rolling Stone (a magazine owned by the capitalist greedhead Jann Wenner, who has spent decades lining his pockets with cash from advertisers). Mr. Vozick-Levinson is probably paid more than Ms. Seltzer. That’s how patriarchy works. Even though both men and women are exploited by their employers, men get paid more, because capitalists are misogynists who cleverly profit from this kind of sexist discrimination. (Of course, that explanation doesn’t make any sense, but I’m just trying to provide a feminist theory of the so-called “wage gap” here and if feminist economic theories are completely irrational, don’t blame me. Rationality is a “construct of male subjectivity,” as I’m sure Adrienne Rich told her husband, the economist, shortly before he blew his Harvard-educated brains out.)

We can’t expect feminists to do math, nor can we expect them all to pursue the premises of the feminist syllogism to a logical conclusion, the way Adrienne Rich did. Most women who call themselves “feminists” are simply Democrats who think that Republican wife and daughters are somehow oppressed in a way that Democrat wives and daughters are not. Hillary and Chelsea Clinton are “empowered” progressive women, liberal feminists believe, whereas Sarah Palin and Carly Fiorina are victims of the patriarchy. Does such a claim make sense? No, but making sense is another “construct of male subjectivity,” you see.

Sarah Seltzer wants “a human blockade around NRA headquarters,” but where will she find the humans necessary to this task? Liberal Democrats keep aborting all their babies and, while I suppose they could hire Mexican immigrants for this kind of “human chain” work, the AFL-CIO would probably demand they get paid union wages. Also, the National Rifle Association’s headquarters is in Fairfax, Virginia — a long way from New York City, where Ms. Seltzer and her liberal friends dream their gun-free dreams. Busing a bunch of gun-grabber from New York to Virginia for this “human chain” project would produce a lot of carbon emissions and contribute to global warming. Besides, do liberals like Ms. Seltzer really want to stop psychos like Chris Harper Mercer (an immigrant) from killing Christians in small-town America? Liberals hate Christians. Liberals hate small towns and they hate America, too.

When a crazy Muslim shoots a bunch of people at Fort Hood, that’s not terrorism, according to liberals, it’s “workplace violence.” When a black guy kills two white people in small-town Virginia on live TV, liberals don’t call that racism, because only Black Lives Matter to liberals. And a bunch of dead Christians in Oregon? Liberals score that a “win” for their side, because the one thing liberals can’t stand is live Christians like Kim Davis, whom Sarah Seltzer denounced as “that bigoted clerk.”

Sarah Marian Seltzer is a feminist and a fool, but I repeat myself. She is just another liberal with bad ideas, like Adrienne Rich’s husband, who was happy to help his wife host “anti-Vietnam and Black Panther fundraising parties at their apartment” and didn’t expect her to become a “militant feminist” who accused him of oppressing her with his “ideology of white male supremacy.” It’s always that way with liberals, who are forever surprised by the predictable consequences of their own bad ideas. Maybe there’s no reason for Sarah Seltzer’s husband to worry about his feminist wife. He’s a smart guy — scored a perfect 800 on the verbal SAT when he was only 13 — and graduated from Harvard himself. Still, “the personal is political,” and it’s probably only a matter of time until Ms. Seltzer decides she is being cruelly oppressed by her husband because, as every feminist knows, oppression is what all husbands do to their wives. Obviously, she’s a victim of the patriarchy.

Alfred Conrad (Harvard, Class of ’47) could not be reached for comment.





 

Category: Sex Trouble

Props to @cypherdog on Twitter

Posted on | October 2, 2015 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

Our Ambassador issued a Strongly Worded Memo:

Iowahawk started us down the path to enlightenment:

Didn’t laugh; I’d cry.

Category: humor

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | October 2, 2015 | Comments Off on Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty

The two imperial wizards met in the sound workshop at the conjunction of the moons. Jurtran sat at the Azelbethor Grand, and Mindor (along with his impedimenta) sat among the Five Cellos of Delbin.

They launched into the Great Spell of the Zephyrus Monsoon when the shadows cast by the moons through the portals indicated the correct instant. Their hands spoke the music into the great artifacts, channeling power through beauty.
Nature heard the melody, the intensity, the perfection of the delivery, and answered with a west wind along the ocean that would propel the fleet to a far shore.

* * *

(See complementary piece by Darleen )

Category: Friday Fiction

Reports: Chris Harper Mercer, 26, Identified as #UCCShooting Gunman

Posted on | October 1, 2015 | 55 Comments

Citing law enforcement sources, CBS News was the first to identify the Umpqua Community College gunman as 26-year-old Chris Harper Mercer. The New York Times reports that it has independently confirmed Harper as the gunman who was killed by officers responding to the massacre at the campus in Roseburg, Oregon.

At least ten people were killed in the shooting, and nothing has been confirmed about Mercer’s background or motives. It has been reported by the Oregonian and by the New York Post that Mercer targeted Christians in the attack, and that he was originally from Torrance, California. Several other claims from various sources about Mercer’s possible motives cannot be confirmed yet.

UPDATE: Badger Pundit reports that Mercer had this on his profile at a dating site for Wiccans and other “spiritual” types:

Hobbies & Interests include “killing zombies, movies, music.”
Ethnicity: “Mixed Race.”
Have Kids: “no — do not want kids”
I currently live “with parents”
Religious: “Not Religious”
Music: “Industrial, Punk, Rock”
Hair Style: “shaved head, short hair”
Groups: “Doesn’t Like Organized Religious; Left-hand Path; Magick and Occult”

UPDATE II: The gunman was an immigrant, born in England. The UK Guardian describes more of Mercer’s apparent online activity:

Harper-Mercer was the son of Ian Mercer and Laurel Margaret Harper. Mercer and Harper filed for divorce on 6 June 2006. He appears to have left an online footprint that hints at interest in mass shootings as well as apparent support for the IRA.
He also appears to have been a prolific user of the file-sharing system Bittorrent.
An email address, “[email protected]”, was found to be associated with a Chris Harper Mercer of Winchester, Oregon, via a public records search. That address is linked to an account on the torrent upload site kat-ph.proxy-x.com, which bears the username “Lithium_Love”.
The final video uploaded by Lithium_Love to the torrent site, just three days ago, was a BBC documentary called Surviving Sandy Hook about the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012.
Other uploads include PDFs of the occult magazine Phenomena, conspiracy-themed documentaries including Lost Secrets of the Illuminati, and assorted soft pornography.
There is also a blog attached to the upload account. The first entry was posted on 6 July 2015 and is titled “The material world is a lie.” It says: “Most people will spend hours standing in front of stores just to buy a new iphone … I used to be like that, always concerned about what clothes I had, rather than whether or not I was happy. But not anymore.
“Since then I have learned the truth that such attachments are falsehoods and will only bring misery. This is my first blog post, there will be more to come.”
Other blogposts complain about the uploading habits of other users. Another bemoans the death of horror filmmaker Wes Craven.
A Myspace page bearing Mercer’s name is filled with pictures of masked gunmen and references to the IRA, including a picture of the front page of a the Irish republican newspaper An Phoblacht, bearing the headline “British Army Could Not Defeat IRA”. Another photo to the page carries the words “IRA undefeated army”.

Mercer formerly lived in Torrance, and the Daily Breeze reports indications that Mercer had a history of behavioral problems:

Records show Harper-Mercer, 26, lived in a ground-floor apartment on Arlington Avenue at 230th Street in Torrance with his mother, Laurel Harper, from 2011 to 2013. . . .
Lists of South Bay graduates from 2009 published in the Daily Breeze showed Harper Mercer graduated from the Switzer Learning Center in Torrance with four other students. Switzer teaches students with learning disabilities and emotional issues.
A former behavioral aide at Switzer, who did not want her name used, said the majority of the students at the school are from foster, low-income and single-parent homes. Some of these students were expelled from other schools or had been in trouble with the law.
The school is divided among special needs students and those with behavioral problems.
Records showed Harper Mercer and his mother moved to Winchester, Ore., in 2013. In addition to Torrance, Harper showed previous addresses in Lomita, Harbor Gateway and Lomita.

 

Category: Crime, Oregon
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin