The Other McCain

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

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | October 9, 2015 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

The proprietor’s impassive face makes monks seem animated. The bedraggled, alcohol-reeking customer struggles to get the jewelry box from the tote, meaningless baubles spilling over the counter. Exchanges words and money. Leaves. The scene clicks.
I ask, “Weren’t the two of you across the bar from each other last night at the tavern next door?”
Nods.
“Seems a good business model; making money as they liquidate their assets, and as they hydrate the flesh.”
Nods again, replies: “It’s a blight on the soul. But my brother won’t listen until he smacks bottom, dislodging the wax in his ears.”

via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

NBC’s New Sitcom: ‘Abortion Barbie’?

Posted on | October 9, 2015 | 32 Comments

Hollywood liberalism beyond parody:

Wendy Davis made national headlines in 2013 for filibustering anti-abortion legislation in the Texas Senate. Now the former Democratic state senator is poised for more national attention as the inspiration for a dramedy series in development at NBC.
Written by Jennifer Cecil, the untitled project centers on a female Democratic senator who, after losing the Texas governor’s race, gets her world turned upside down. In the vein of The Good Wife, while she pieces her pride back together, she goes to work in the law firm of her best friend — a black male Republican — and discovers that with no political future to protect, she can unshackle her inner badass.

Why would anyone imagine that this kind of story would be able to attract a national audience? This is further evidence of the extent to which the entertainment industry is run by Democrats whose partisan politics dictate the content of what they produce. Many of the movies and TV shows that emerge from Hollywood are simply unwatchable because so many people in the industry place liberal activism ahead of every other consideration.

(Via Memeorandum.)

 

Category: Hollywood

That Crazy Buck Rogers Stuff

Posted on | October 8, 2015 | 17 Comments

— by Wombat-socho


So, a couple of weeks ago in the comments Goodstuff brought up the topic of Buck Rogers, and I was going to write about that last week in the book post, but I Forgot. Going to remedy that failure right here and now. The original Buck Rogers tale, Armageddon 2419 A.D. is widely available on Kindle and in dead-tree editions, usually packaged with its sequel “The Airlords of Han”. For those of you that missed out, these are the history of the Second American Revolution, in which Anthony “Buck” Rogers, veteran of the First World War, wakes from a state of suspended animation due to radioactive gases and winds up leading the scattered bands of Americans to victory against the Han invaders, who conquered America early in the 22nd century. It’s a fun little pair of stories, and only an SJW would whimper about its roots in the “yellow peril” literature that was popular in the 1920s. It was rebooted by Martin Caidin (author of Cyborg, which became The Six Million Dollar Man) in 1995 as Buck Rogers : A Life in the Future.


Perhaps more interesting are the four sequels written by various authors to an outline by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle: Mordred, by John E. Holmes, in which an aged Anthony Rogers must deal with his half-Han son, who is attempting to reverse his father’s victory; Warriors Blood, by Richard McEnroe, in which it’s revealed that the Han are actually human/alien hybrids, and Rogers himself has been mysteriously rejuvenated by alien technology…but there’s a nasty catch to it. I don’t recall reading the sequel, Warriors World, in which Rogers and the Americans must cope with an even worse threat triggered by their desperate assault on the aliens’ Lunar Base, but if it’s as good as Warrior’s Blood, then at worst, it’s decent brain candy. I haven’t found my copy of John Silbersack’s Rogers Rangers yet, but I definitely recall it being the capstone to the four books, with Rogers leading a motley crew of rebel aliens and human refugees back from a a secret base to liberate Earth from the aliens. As I said, not great books on the order of Ender’s Game or The Mote In God’s Eye, but decent brain candy, and used paperbacks can be had quite cheaply.


Also arriving in the mail this week, the David Drake tribute anthology Onward, Drake!, edited by Mark Van Name. It contains stories by Larry Correia, Sarah Hoyt, Gene Wolfe, Barry Malzberg, John Lambshead and others, as well as tributes from Tom Doherty, Toni Weisskopf, and S.M. Stirling; in addition, the afterwords from the authors and Drake himself are outstanding. Did I mention there’s new Hammer’s Slammers stories, one of them by Drake? Not at all sorry I splashed out and got the limited edition, not at all, but I am sure the Kindle edition reads just as well.


Category: Books

In The Mailbox, 10.08.15

Posted on | October 8, 2015 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox, 10.08.15

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Hillary Clinton’s E-Mails – In The Cloud?
The Camp of the Saints: Ungrateful Little Shi’itehead
Political Hat: Diversity Is Now The Be All End All Of Academia
Michelle Malkin: Gitmo Extended Stay Suites In Colorado? Hell No!
Doug Powers: Global Warming Causes Sierra Club President To Melt Under Ted Cruz’ Questioning
Twitchy: “The Dim Bulb Thing Wasn’t An Act?” Andy Richter Tries His Hand At #GunSense
Shark Tank: Brian Mast – “Syrian Refugees Should Be Taking Up Arms To Fight ISIS”


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Gallup Won’t Do Tracking Polls For 2016 Campaign
American Thinker: Was The Oregon Shooting An Islamist Attempt To Assassinate Alek Skarlatos?
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – Buffalo Trail By Jeff Guinn
Conservatives4Palin: Governor Palin Shares Interview Of “Iconic Drudge”
Don Surber: Dave Weigel Seems To Think WV Will Go For Bernie Sanders
Jammie Wearing Fools: It’s Time To Impeach The IRS Commissioner
Joe For America: McCarthy Out Of Race For Speaker
JustOneMinute: Losing Their Religion
Pamela Geller: Captured ISIS Fighter Has Map Full Of Targets For Berlin Takeover
Protein Wisdom: DiBlasio Threatens NYC Museums And Cultural Institutions Over “Diversity”
Shot In The Dark: Keep Guns Out Of The Hands Of Straw Men
STUMP: What Should Be Taught, Part II – Reactions To Japan Humanities Ban
The Gateway Pundit: Ten-Year-Old Minnesota Girl Raped By Muslim Refugee In Elevator
The Jawa Report: We Gonna Make Them Pay
The Lonely Conservative: Obama Claims Defunding Planned Parenthood Would Wreck The Economy
This Ain’t Hell: Army Postpones SFC Martland’s Discharge
Weasel Zippers: Air Force Hero Who Helped Stop Paris Terror Attack Stabbed In Sacramento, Now In Stable Consition – Two Asian Men Sought
Megan McArdle: Facebook Is Big, But Big Networks Can Fall
Mark Steyn: The Undocumented Branch Of The Electoral College


Introducing Amazon Handmade

Category: Linkagery

America’s Finest Literary Critic Is in Federal Prison, and Rightly So

Posted on | October 8, 2015 | 24 Comments

Damn his atheist soul, but Barrett Brown is an excellent writer. His mistake was to think this qualified him to be an “investigative journalist,” a task for which his heroin addiction probably disqualified him, as if his habit of associating with criminal terrorists were not bad enough. Fortunately for Barrett, he flipped out in September 2012 and threatened an FBI agent in a manic YouTube meltdown. This has provided him the opportunity to write literary criticism, and this week Barrett Brown takes on novelist Jonathan Frantzen:

In Purity, marriages fail one after another in excruciating 50-page flashbacks. No one is particularly likable or even unlikable, though a few do manage to be insufferable. Toward the end we’re treated to one great character, the cynical plutocrat dad of one of the dastardly feminists, but then he disappears from view and promptly dies. The megalomaniacal information activist is admirably complex, but as a megalomaniacal information activist myself, I found him unconvincing. The one murder that serves to kick off the plot is perpetuated against an otherwise minor off-screen character rather than one of the several main characters whom the reader might have much preferred to see murdered. Franzen is also rather hard on the ladies, whereas everyone would have been better served had he instead been harder on himself and maybe put out a better book.
It’s worth reiterating, though, that this sort of subject matter is not my cup of tea to begin with, and I certainly don’t want anyone to refrain from reading a novel that might interest them simply because I said mean things about it. If you’re up for a “moving meditation on marriage and friendship,” then you should probably read Freedom over and over again until your eyes bleed. If divorce and infidelity and guilt and trial separation is your thing, then you’d better get your ass over to the nearest book store and pick up a copy of Purity. You need not worry about what I think. But if you’re curious anyway, what I think is that I hate you.

You can and should read the whole thing, and laugh as you envision Barrett doing hard time in a federal penitentiary, where he is paying his debt to society and writing witty essays.

 

Category: Barrett Brown

‘The Psychology of Female Objectification’

Posted on | October 7, 2015 | 53 Comments

Harvard University sophomore Lily Calcagnini.

“Each time a woman is catcalled, publicly humiliated, and forced to ignore it, the psychology of female objectification becomes evermore seared into the brains of all actors and bystanders involved. We’re already conditioned to look at a woman and see the raw sum of her physical components before we consider her brain. The more we reinforce this subconscious thought process, the more ingrained it becomes in our psychology.”
— Lily Calcagnini, Harvard Crimson, Oct. 6, 2015

“In contrast to young women, whose empowerment can be seen as a process of resistance to male dominated heterosexuality, young, able-bodied, heterosexual men can access power through the language, structures and identities of hegemonic masculinity.”
— Janet Holland, Caroline Ramazanoglu, Sue Sharpe and Rachel Thomson, The Male in the Head: Young People, Heterosexuality and Power (1998)

“The discourses which particularly oppress all of us, lesbians, women, and homosexual men, are those discourses which take for granted that what founds society, any society, is heterosexuality. . . . These discourses of heterosexuality oppress us in the sense that they prevent us from speaking unless we speak in their terms.”
— Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” 1978

The “discourses of heterosexuality” described by French lesbian feminist Monique Wittig are probably not the catcalls described by Lily Calcagnini, but the underlying idea is the same: Male sexual attraction to women is inherently oppressive. The “empowerment” of women requires “resistance to male dominated heterosexuality,” as Professor Holland and her colleagues explained in a book based on feminist gender theory, which regards heterosexuality and male domination as synonymous, two ways of saying the same thing. Heterosexuality reduces a woman to “the raw sum of her physical components,” as Ms. Calcagnini phrases it, and any man who would impose this condition upon her can do so only through the “power . . . of hegemonic masculinity.”

When a college sophomore asserts that we are psychologically “conditioned” to take for granted the “objectification” of women, she thereby invokes a feminist theoretical understanding of sexual behavior that extends far beyond the subject of catcalling. Consider first that Ms. Calcagnini wrote this column in the Harvard Crimson, whose readers are enrolled at arguably the world’s most prestigious institution of higher education. Next consider the sort of behavior she describes:

To the candid man who approached me, rubbing your crotch and murmuring that you could make love to me all day and night, Baby: I could probably call the cops on you at any hour, Buddy.
To the two sirs who, from the safety of your car, hurled cries of Chica, Beautiful Lady, Sexy, Mami, Honey, and Pretty One out of your windows: You made me want to cry.
As you pounded the center of your steering wheel with the palm of your hand, commanding the attention of additional passers-by with each honk of your horn, you encouraged others to join in your objectification game. Powerless, I waited for your traffic light to change, so you would speed away towards the next corner and the next girl.

Are we to believe that these lecherous brutes are Harvard students, so that by writing about their uncouth behavior in the Crimson, Ms. Calcagnini thinks she is addressing the perpetrators directly? Of course not. There might be men at Harvard who occasionally get a bit rowdy, but they are not honking their horns while yelling chica at girls.

In 2015, no man smart enough to go college would ever dare express sexual interest in a female classmate for fear of being accused of “harassment.” Feminists have made university life in the 21st-century a Danger Zone for heterosexual males, who are at risk of expulsion if they even attempt to become intimate with a woman on campus.

She does not need any evidence in order to accuse him of sexual assault. Once accused, a male student will discover he has no due-process rights in the Title IX hearings where accused males are automatically presumed guilty. These accusations may be made long after an alleged incident. A male student may find himself accused of sexually assaulting an ex-girlfriend whom he continued dating (and having consensual sex with) for many months after whatever incident she may claim was non-consensual whenever a desire for post-breakup revenge strikes her. In other words, your freshman-year girlfriend could wait until your senior year to accuse you of having raped her three years earlier, and thereby quite possibly prevent you from graduating. This is “equality” in 2015.

Feminism’s anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology promotes a sexual paranoia I call “Fear and Loathing of the Penis,” and this in turn has helped incentivize false accusations of rape. At Harvard in 2014, there were 33 reports of sexual assault, of which six were “determined to be ‘unfounded,’ i.e. ‘false or baseless.’” This climate of anti-male fanaticism has led to the enactment of so-called “affirmative consent” policies, with the practical result that is never safe to assume that any sexual activity on campus is legal, as Ashe Schow of the Washington Examiner has explained. At an elite school like Harvard, where tuition is $45,278 a year, a male student would be a fool to take the risk of becoming sexually involved with a female classmate, since Harvard women evidently are willing to make “false or baseless” rape accusations.

Analyzing the Harvard sexual assault data, Reason magazine’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown determined that a “worst-case-scenario assumption means that about one in 114 female undergraduates reported rapes at Harvard last year” — a far cry from the 1-in-5 rate of campus sexual assault claimed by radical feminists (a claim promoted by President Obama, among others). If more than 99% of Harvard women are not at risk of rape, however, this doesn’t prevent Ms. Calcagnini from indicting all male heterosexuals as complicit in harassment:

Catcalls are arresting because they decontextualize the language of physical attraction that might be meaningful when exchanged between lovers. I’m flattered to know that someone who cares deeply about me also finds me beautiful, but this is only because I know that they appreciate my personhood more than my biological ability to have sex.
Using the same language, a catcall is vapid. It reduces my worth to that of my appearance. In the public context of the street, coming from the mouth of a stranger, a catcall exploits the verbiage of intimacy and makes me feel both objectified and powerless to rebuke my objectification.
Moreover, there is implicit sexual intent in a catcall by nature of the fact that it is spoken aloud. Since anyone can enjoyably objectify me without my knowing, I must take a man’s brazen expression of arousal to mean that he’s hoping for some favor in return. Hoping that he’s singled out a woman whose self-esteem is low. Hoping that I’ll forget I’m en route to Spanish and will instead fulfill his sexual fantasies in an alley. Hoping that, to quote the gallant young man who followed me around Harvard Square yesterday, I will “suck his d–k.” . . .
Perpetrators of this kind of objectification may not realize how many women they undermine when they insult one. Their comments dismantle the significant, but clearly still inadequate, social progress that feminists have made for all women.

Who was that young man who followed Ms. Calcagnini around Harvard Square, soliciting her to perform oral sex? You could safely wager $100 that he is not a Harvard student, that he does not read the Crimson, and thus is not confronted with her accusation that his crude behavior is dismantling “social progress,” about which he almost certainly does not give a damn. No, this denunciation of catcalling is a signifying gesture which affords Ms. Calcagnini the opportunity to inform Harvard men that “objectification” — a feminist term for normal male appreciation of female beauty — is unacceptable. She describes how men “enjoyably objectify me without my knowing” (i.e., she is aware that men derive pleasure from looking at her), but is offended by any vocal expression of male sexual interest, because this “reduces my worth to that of my appearance.” Rather than this type of interest, she desires instead “someone who cares deeply about me,” and who therefore will “appreciate my personhood more than my biological ability to have sex.”

Did anyone besides me notice that Ms. Calcagnini uses gender-neutral language (“someone who cares deeply about me . . . they appreciate my personhood”) to describe the sort of attention she welcomes whereas, by contrast, it is “a man’s brazen expression of arousal” and “his sexual fantasies” that she makes clear are undermining “social progress that feminists have made”? While there is no specific reason to suspect that Ms. Calcagnini is a lesbian — other than the fact that she attends Harvard and calls herself a feminist — why else would she use the pages of the Crimson to excoriate heterosexual males this way?

Permit me to confess that my wife’s “biological ability to have sex” was so high on the list of qualities that attracted my attention, I could scarcely comprehend her “personhood” otherwise. If I may be allowed to “decontextualize the language of physical attraction” here, exactly how does Ms. Calcagnini suppose a heterosexual man experiences “arousal”? What aspect of her “personhood” does any woman expect a normal man to “appreciate” more than her “biological ability to have sex”? Is this not the sine qua non of heterosexuality?

Civilized men do not yell crude comments from car windows at women on the street, but if we assume that readers of the Harvard Crimson are civilized, what is the point of lecturing them about this? Quite clearly, Ms. Calcagnini’s column had some ulterior purpose, perhaps to guilt-trip any heterosexual male reader who might “enjoyably objectify” her — i.e., look at her and like what he sees — because she is disgusted by the thought that he is aware of her “biological ability to have sex.”

Have I been “conditioned to look at a woman and see the raw sum of her physical components”? If so, who “conditioned” me this way and how, and at such an early age that in kindergarten I developed a crush on Priscilla Yates, a slightly plump brunette with a gap between her front teeth and freckles on her nose? Early and often did I “objectify” girls — Janet Howton, Joanna Richardson and Carol Purdy, to name three objects of my elementary school crushes — before I had even a remote understanding of how “the raw sum of her physical components” related to the “biological ability to have sex.” The idea that male admiration for female beauty is “conditioned” is as ridiculous as the assertion that this entirely natural “objectification” precludes men from being able also to “consider her brain” or appreciate her “personhood.” Are men at Harvard so stupid that they cannot likewise differentiate these concepts? Why does Ms. Calcagnini presume she can accuse the Crimson‘s highly educated male readers of stupidity without anyone answering her insulting imputation? Is it because she knows that no man at Harvard would risk the feminist outrage if he dared publish an answer?

SCANDAL: Man Likes Good-Looking Women;
Expelled by Harvard for ‘Objectification’
‘These Discourses of Heterosexuality Oppress Us!’

Normal male behavior is now a human rights violation. The man who expresses a preference for beautiful women could “dismantle the . . . social progress that feminists have made for all women.”

Used to be, you could get locked up in a lunatic asylum for spewing that kind of deranged gibberish. Now they send you to Harvard.

(Hat-tip: Badger Pundit on Twitter.)





 

Category: Sex Trouble

In The Mailbox: 10.06.15

Posted on | October 6, 2015 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


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


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


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Category: Linkagery

When Excellence Is Expected

Posted on | October 6, 2015 | 58 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not my problem.

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

Not my problem.

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

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

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

Ian Mercer apparently never gave his weirdo son that advice:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To which I repeat: Not my problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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





 

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